Overrated does not mean bad. That’s obvious, but I feel I need to point that out to save myself from hate-filled emails. None of these would five would fit on my worst of 2012 list. There are things so much worse. These films are watchable, but have garnered far more praise than they deserve.
#5 Ted
The story of a man-child, his nearly perfect hot girlfriend, and his crude living teddy bear supplies a reasonable number of laughs, and shines when compared to most of 2012’s lame crop of comedies. However, when it popped up on multiple critics’ top ten lists, the world went out of whack. Seth MacFarlane, the mind and voice behind TV’s Family Guy, brings his edgy, twisted, animated-comedy sensibilities to the big screen, and nothing more. Actually he brings a little less as Ted is about the level of his lesser, but still funny American Dad. Here was a chance for him to go wild, and he didn’t. Half the episodes in any season of Family Guy are smarter, more transgressive, and just funnier, and they play four or five times a night on cable. Ted is fine viewing, but nothing special.
#4 The Dark Knight Rises
This tale of revenge and regeneration is the most interesting of Nolan’s trilogy, and one of the most interesting films of the year, but interesting does not mean good. On the plus side, the many (many, many) political references could keep you in water cooler conversations for months. Add in some middling action and a sexy Cat Woman and we’ve get a moderately entertaining superhero movie.
On the minus side, like Nolan’s previous entries, it wears its self-importance like a badge of honor. But The Dark Knight Rises brings along a new set of flaws that ripped me out of the film: so many flaws in so many different areas. There are flaws in medicine (broken backs heal with rope and pulleys), psychology (depressed shut-in becomes extroverted again when a girl pops in), time & space (travel to and from distant deserts is timeless), senses (no secret identity is safe from orphan-eyes), action (an army of police run down a long street toward an army of henchmen and no one uses a hand gun), banking (the Fed would never just let the stock trading go through), criminology (the inmates of hell hole prisons are the nicest people), police practices (every policeman in Gotham goes under the city), verisimilitude (the cinematography paints a realistic world, but in-flight CIA plane gobbling is not realistic), pacing (let’s see some trucks drive around…again), mystery (did anyone not know the “secret” villain?), climax (truck crash; I’ll say no more), and many more. If you can suspend your disbelief for The Dark Knight Rises‘s overlong running time then you have superhuman gating abilities.
#3 Holy Motors
Mainstream critics love to praise a foreign-language film they don’t understand and no one understands Holy Motors. The real fun is not watching the movie, but reading reviews where the author tries so very hard to say something sensible, and fails. “It’s about voyeurism” they cry, and no doubt they are correct, but what about voyeurism they cannot say. “It implies that life is a show,” and again they are right, though Shakespeare said a great deal more in a single line.
The story follows a man who travels around town in a limo, going from “appointment” to “appointment” where each appointment consists of him transforming himself into a different person and living for a time as that person. This is interesting for a time and occasionally comical, though I found myself laughing at it more often than with it. By the halfway point, the routine had gotten old and I was left feeling that any theme could have been presented in a short film. By the time the chimps show up… Well, maybe this would be a great film if you were really high.
#2 Beasts of the Southern Wild
Critics affection for obtuse foreign fare is nothing next to their love of little indie fantasy films where all of the fantastic elements can be written off as a dream. It saves them from admitting to liking fantastic fiction while allowing them to give a nod to the genre. Toss in a condescending look at the impoverished and a spunky child and it is orgasm time.
The child here is indeed spunky, and good enough that her Academy Award nom is not an embarrassment. The directing and story do not stand up so well as it is a surprisingly ugly film that meanders here and there. Hey, it’s about a young girl’s bravery and world view during tough times, so why bother with a plot? (Yes, you should be able to answer that question.) Giant boars do pop up from time to time, ushered in by a storm that is half Katrina, half the apocalypse, and all metaphor. It is an hour and a half of boredom and pretension, wrapped with an uncomfortable poverty porn bow. The child deserved better.
#1 Looper
Beware science fiction films labelled as smart, as they rarely are, and never have anything else to offer. Looper is this year’s go to film for critics who don’t read. The basic story is incredibly straightforward. Two gunmen must face each other, with one trying to protect a child so that the kid won’t grow up with a bad childhood the way he had. The “complexity” comes from one gunman being the future version of the other who’s traveled back in time. Of course this brings up the grandfather paradox, which was old for any reader of SF by 1930. So how does this smart 2012 movie deal with this problem, a problem that is extremely important to the structure of the film, and to the characters’ choices? It doesn’t. Instead Bruce Willis’s old gunman says he’s not going to explain any of that time travel shit, and that’s it. After that, the film does whatever it wants and ignores rules. That can be OK in an action flick, but most of the action here involves looking at farm fields. If you like your sci-fii to be adventure low but farm house high, you are in luck. Looper is slow, unengaging, and as dumb as one of the posts that farmhouse no doubt uses.