15 Most Over-Rated Movies Of The 21st Century

For some WALL-E is a film ‘Mixing Chaplinesque delicacy with the architectural grandeur of a Stanley Kubrick film’ and for others the ‘most powerful environmental film’ of the noughties, but for those who don’t take so readily to fellating Pixar at every given opportunity it’s another mawkish, Walt Disney sanctioned cash cow masquerading as something more meaningful and well-intentioned.

Robot protagonist WALL-E – a shorter, squatter rip-off of Short Circuit’s Johnny Five – bleeps and bloops his way through Earth’s wastelands alone until somewhat predictably falling in love with a fellow bot and generating enough cutesiness to captivate kids and romantic fools. Inevitably, given Disney's bent for moralism, it then descends into a preachy parable about how corporate greed and mankind’s lazy consumerism has ruined the planet.

Nothing new or indeed erroneous about that message, but the hypocrisy of a multimillion-dollar, merchandise-obsessed brand whose films come accompanied with a tidal wave of consumer trinkets – as did WALL-E, from lunchboxes and plushies to remote-controlled toys and dancing iPod docks – is too much to bear.