10 Most Overrated Movies Of 2016 (So Far)

2016 has been a weird year for films so far, hasn't it? In the ratings department, especially, where lots of worthwhile movies have been unnecessarily slammed and tons of mediocre ones have been praised to high heaven. What's going on?

Nowadays, of course, we have "helpful" websites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic at our disposal to work out whether a film deserves our attention; critical aggregators that weigh the overall worthiness of a picture and give the punters a chance to see what the critics said about it without having to read any reviews.

Still, one can't help but feel like percentage-based scores like these often come out way, way too high, and no year in cinema history has epitomised such a fact more than 2016, where incredibly flawed movies have ended up with scores that just don't make any sense; films that aren't anywhere near as good as they've been deemed by the critical body that need to be knocked down a peg or two.

Which bring us to this list. After highlighting some of the most underrated movies of the year a couple of weeks back, it's time to take a look at the most overrated films using the same specifications: 10 movies that - for a number of reasons - have been given a lot more credit than they deserve, either by the critics, audiences, or both...

The Nice Guys received a lot of praise this year for being a fun, frantic yarn featuring an affable duo - played by Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe - and more banter than you can shake an Ocean's Eleven film at. And it is sort of all those things, sort of, except not at all close to standard you'd expect from Shane Black, the man who wrote Lethal Weapon and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, those genre-busting classics.

That's not to say that The Nice Guy isn't entertaining for much of its runtime, but there are issues at its core that the majority of movie-goers and critics seem to have ignored - deep, fundamental issues that expose it as a work of relentless self-plagiarism. Because this feels like Shane Black reprising the beats of his other, better films without any need to do so. It has its moments, but it only half works: jokes fall flat, the plot is incomprehensible, potentially great characters are wasted...

Gosling and Crowe don't quite gel in the way that the trailers would have you believe, either, which is a shame - they're an odd couple, sure, but not quite memorable and their sense of buddy chemistry doesn't really come together.

When it's all over, it's as if the movie has ended prematurely - like we've made it through act two, with act three is set follow. That isn't the case, and so the only suitable reaction to The Nice Guys is actually something close to: "Disappointing, that."