Have you ever found yourself watching a movie and thinking to yourself, "What on earth is the big deal about this character? Why all the fuss?" They're the sort of character you immediately recognize as the hero, but at the same time you sit there a little baffled at their popularity, confounded by all the praise heaped upon them by their fans. It isn't that they're necessarily bad characters - although some of them certainly are - but rather that they lack something special and defining that makes them unique and more interesting than the heroic characters found in countless other movies. Millions of people adore them, but from where you're sitting they're just not that great. In fact if anything they're a bit... well, overrated. It could be argued that the hero by definition is a character archetype - perhaps the ultimate archetype - and that criticising them for displaying the qualities of one is unfair. But that's a lazy defense of generic characterization - after all, the ancient Greeks were able to make their hero figures complex and interesting, so why not modern day filmmakers? As the idiom goes, one man's meat is another man's poison, and with that in mind let's take a look at 10 of the most overrated heroes in movie history, which naturally readers are encouraged to dispute in the comments below...
