10 Movies That Seriously Don't Deserve Their Critical Acclaim

5. Saving Private Ryan

The brief summary for Saving Private Ryan on Rotten Tomatoes describes Steven Spielberg's mammoth war epic as "unflinchingly realistic". Presumably this doesn't include the fact that the entire premise of the movie - that a band of soldiers would be sent to relieve one man of his duty after his other brothers died in combat - is on the face of it utterly absurd. It's the kind of sentimentality that Spielberg indulges in on a regular basis, although for the most part this isn't as out of place as it is here. In Saving Private Ryan it comes across as a crude device to give the film mass appeal: Spielberg needs his idealistic heroes - however at odds with the faceless nature of war this may be (something Malick understood far better with his World War 2 movie The Thin Red Line) - and for the most part the American GIs are as one-dimensionally good as the Germans are bad. Saving Private Ryan isn't completely lacking in nuance and the critics were right when they marveled at the technical achievements on display, but to label this as one of the greatest war movies is something of a stretch - it's a great action film, but movies like Come And See, Ivan's Childhood and Apocalyse Now are just a few of the many superior war movies out there.