The Matt Walsh Show - Matt Walsh Ranks The Top 5 Most OVERRATED Films

Episode Date: August 31, 2024

This is the definitive list of the most overrated films of all time, no arguments please.   - - -   Today’s Sponsors:   ExpressVPN - Go to https://expressvpn.com/walshYT and find out how you can get 3 months of ExpressVPN free! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Now, this is the definitive list. There can be no argument, no discussion. We should turn off comments on YouTube because this list is so verifiably correct that there's really nothing to talk about. Now, one thing to remember as we proceed is this, overrated does not mean bad. So I'm not saying that the films on this list are bad.

Some of them are, but not all of them. Overrated just means that they aren't as good as people make them out to be. Their reputation is greater than the actual product on the screen. So, let's begin. Number five, Shawshank Redemption. Now, this is not a bad film.

It is, in fact, it's a pretty good film. But it has gained the reputation of a cinematic masterpiece, mostly because millennials grew up watching the movie on TNT, where it aired approximately 46 times a week. And Shawshank is a, it's a fine story. It's a well-told story. But it's also incredibly cliched, overwrought, quite cheesy, extremely predictable. Every character is a walking archetype.

Every story beat can be seen from a mile away. The movie doesn't do anything new or different with the prison drama format, except sanitize it. So Shawshank is to prison movies, what Remember the Titans is, to football movies. They're both massively overrated. Not even the best versions of their particular subgenre, much less are they in the conversation for the greatest movies of all time. My biggest problem, though, with Shawshank is that the inmates are all the nicest, most decent human beings you could ever meet. Minus the two who are rapists.

It's your world, boss. All the rest of them are kind, sensitive, friendly souls. they hang out, they play board games, they go to the library, they start a book club, they run a lemonade stand out front. Not all that actually happens to the movie, but it could have happened. So if not for the evil warden and the couple of rapists, Shawshank actually seems like not a bad place to spend time. Like, it's not even clear why Tim Robbins wants to escape so badly. So, and that takes away from a lot of the drama and attention. Number four, Toy Story. Now, again, a good film for what it is. It's one of the best kids' movies

in the last three decades. It's just not good enough to warrant three sequels with a fourth on the way. No. My main problem with Toy Story is the villain. Sid, who's the supposedly evil child living next door in the first Toy Story film. But what is Sid's great crime?

Like, what did he do wrong? He takes apart his toys and reassembles them. This makes him a bad person? He didn't know the toys were alive. So how could you blame him for that? He thought they were inanimate objects. How can we blame him for his treatment of inanimate objects.

Like if it turns out that my chair is actually alive, am I suddenly a scumbag for sitting on it all these years? So in fact, Sid is arguably a more sympathetic character than Andy. Sid is creative. He takes old toys and turns them into new shapes and interesting creatures. Meanwhile, Andy forms very unhealthy fixations on his toys.

Never does anything interesting or creative with them. And like there's nothing wrong with a child having a toy, but it's like it's a bit overboard. Okay, you're a little bit too old to be this attached to your toys, Andy. Well, whatever, all right? I mean, it is, it's just, it's time to grow up. So it may seem unfair for me to rate Toy Story

as overrated just for this reason, but this is my list and I'll do what I want. Like I said, we're not talking about it. Your comments are not welcome. I don't care what you think. This is just the truth. Number three, the Dark Night. Now, once again, good film.

It just isn't the masterpiece that people make it out to be. Without Heath Ledger's great performance, this movie wouldn't be remembered for anything in particular. Like, take Keith Ledger out of it. What does anyone remember about this movie? Who cares about this movie, except for that?

It's great by Batman movie standards, but it's not great as a piece of cinema. I thought my jokes were bad. For example, how does the Joker wire an entire hospital with enough explosives to demolish it in 15 seconds without anyone noticing? This is a working hospital. People are in it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. How did you, you wired the whole thing? It's not even just like one part of it explodes. The whole thing is taken down.

Now, get ready for the bull! Now the movie hopes that you won't notice that problem because you'll be distracted by like the moment in the hospital when Joker shows up in Two-Face's room wearing a surgical mask and isn't noticed by Two-Face until he takes the mask off. But even with the mask on, you can still tell that he has white face paint and black paint around his eyes. So how did Two-Face, the criminal genius, not noticed that? Well, maybe it's because Two-Face isn't a criminal genius in this. He's a villain for about a half a scene and then he's dead.

It's like Christopher Nolan forgot to include Two-Face. They were about to put the movie out. It was like a week, and the movie's gonna come out, and someone says, whoa, we forgot, we're gonna put Two-Face in this thing. Oh, yeah, then they gotta go back and they just add Two-Face in. And you can just take Two-Face out,

and it doesn't change anything in the movie at all. Harvey? I'm sorry. But my biggest issue is the end when Joker somehow wires two boats, two ferries with explosives. Again, nobody knows how he did this. And then the passengers on each boat are told that they have to press a button and blow the other boat up before their own boat explodes.

And one of the boats is full of convicted criminals, right? And then, of course, all the criminals band together and decide to do the right thing and not blow up the other boat. They said, come on, guys, let's do the right. Come on, folks. Hey, fellas, come on, let's do the right thing here. Because we all know that criminals are renowned for their humanity and generosity and lack of self-interest.

Maybe these were all inmates, you know, from Shawshank. Like, maybe that... They just so happen to be... The nicest criminals ever happened to be on this boat. So the movie just didn't have the courage of its convictions. That's what I didn't like about. Let me ask you something. What if there was someone out there who kept a log of every single thing you did every minute of the day?

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visit expressvpn.com slash WalshYT. That's EXP, R-S-V-N.com slash Walsh-Y-T. You can get an extra three months free, ExpressVPN.com slash Walsh YT. Number two, Marvel movies, all of them. The whole Marvel movie canon, they are all overrated because they're all rated as being at least better than cinematic slop, which is what they all are, all are.

They're all bad. Like every single Marvel movie is bad. There's never been a good one. I hate to tell you. The original Iron Man is really, really great. So the original Guardian in the Galaxy was a real breath of fresh air. Ant Man is wildly underrated to me. Doctor Strange 2016, again, enjoyable, and Thor Ragnarok is just pure silly.

The Marvel Superhero franchise started out with like silly, dumb movies that were silly and dumb, but at least kind of fun in a very brainless bordering on mind-numbing way. But then as the films kept getting churned out, they got longer and longer and more redundant and lazier. lazier, like by the end of this whole run, each movie is six and a half hours long. And it's, but it's the same, like, somehow every movie is the same as the last one, but longer. Aside from that, the movies have no stakes. And this problem became more pronounced as they started adding multiple universes and so on, until there were so many realities and so many universes that nothing that happened in any

particular universe matters anymore. You can kill off somebody in one universe. there's an infinite supply of new versions to replace them. So who gives a shit then at that point? See what I mean? Not very bright. In the old days, a superhero was fighting a villain who wanted to maybe take over a city or something,

but then it's like, okay, now they want to destroy a whole planet, and then they're going to destroy a whole galaxy. And then eventually he's like, he's going to destroy the whole universe. Except that that doesn't even matter, because this is one universe of a trillion, and so who cares about this universe? But the writing was so bad and so lazy that even the threat of universal destruction wasn't enough to create any real emotional investment in the story. Number one, the most overrated film of all time is Star Wars.

It's fine. It's decent. It's not deserving of the worshipful praise it receives, and it certainly does not warrant the 10 billion trillion films and shows and everything else that came after them. It's not true. the original Star Wars movies were solid B movies. That's impossible. The acting's pretty poor, especially by Mark Hamill. Really, really bad acting. The script is kind of cheesy and derivative in parts. And I say derivative, not because, oh, you know,

everything after Star Wars is ripping it off, so I'm just used to it. You know, even Star Wars, when it came out, was derivative of sci-fi that had come before it. It actually was not doing anything all that new. And, you know, but that's fine. Darth Vader is a 12-year-old boy's idea of a scary villain. like he's not actually menacing and he doesn't create real tension.

Like if I'm in a room and Darth Vader walks in, I'm not going to be that scared. Like, I'm sorry, I'm not that scared. You got the, again, again with the cape, the first thing I'm thinking is like, why are you wearing it? You're a dork already because you're walking around in a cape. You don't need to have the cape on. And I'm just not like, I'm not that scary. Sorry. Anton Shigur walks in.

I'm scared. Okay? I'm scared by that guy. A bunch of 12-year-old boys watch those movies when they came out in the 70s and 80s. and love them, which is understandable. But then they grew up, and they insisted that the movies are still as great as they remember them being when they were 12. And that's the problem.

Nothing is as good as you thought it was when you were 12, okay? You were 12. Okay. All right. You think you can do this to me? And Star Wars is the same way. Now, you all need to grow up and realize that. The answer is never.

Do you hear me? Never. Never.