15 Most Over-Rated Movies Of The 21st Century
4. Amélie
When then festival president Gilles Jacob denied Jean-Pierre
Jeunet’s French romantic comedy a screening at Cannes after deeming it
uninteresting, it caused a mini furore with fans of the film. Whimsical as it
was, the film connoisseur wasn’t far off the mark.
Amélie’s titular heroine is a quirky, young waitress living in bohemian Montmartre who after a few disappointing exploits has given up on romance, instead deciding to dedicate her life to making others happy via her kooky antics (including abducting her dad’s beloved garden gnome and practically kidnapping a perplexed blind man and talking him on a whirlwind talking tour of Paris). Predictably and despite her procrastinations, she falls in love with a fellow quirky Parisian, gets the guy and lives happily after.
Yes, Paris is picture postcard pretty and Audrey Tatou suitably doe-eyed and pixieish as Amélie but that withstanding, the film never strays that far beyond your bog-standard rom-com formula, and it’s probable that if it had been anything but French – say, for example, a Brit rom-com starring a floppy-haired, mumbling Hugh Grant – it wouldn’t have received half the critical praise it did.