I must agree with those who believe this film is badly overrated(MAJOR SPOILERS TO FOLLOW)...

Rating: 5/10 (22 October 2003)

In fact, while it is well-acted, it isn't at all a successful film in my opinion, because it bails out on a storyline it doesn't have the guts to follow through on. Let me explain this in detail, because I want to be clear about this-- the people who made this film are exceptional artists(especially its late, great cinematographer Conrad L. Hall), and they're certainly not careless people. But in this case, I think they blew it.
The very first scene of this film shows a videotape recording of a girl being asked by her boyfriend if she would like him to kill her father. She replies, "Yes. Would you?" Now, why is this scene there? It is repeated and shown in its full context later, in which the boy later says, somewhat unconvincingly, that he was kidding. But in showing this scene twice, the movie creates a very real expectation in any viewer who is reasonably well-versed in the mechanics of the mystery genre.
That's what "American Beauty" is, ultimately-- it is the story of a murder, and of a murder victim. You can tell a murder story in many ways, but usually they're just variations of the following two plotlines. You can either make the story about finding out who the killer is, or you can make the killer known early, and make the story about hunting that person down. "American Beauty" sets up the expectation, by repeating that scene, that Lester Burnham, who tells us in the first scene he'll be dead by the end of the movie, will be murdered, and that these two kids will kill him. Part of the intrigue of watching "American Beauty" after the repeated scene is in learning how much you like both Lester Burnham and his daughter and her boyfriend, and in hoping against hope that the result the movie has promised won't happen. But then, it doesn't. The movie bails out, and pins the crime on the one wholly unsympathetic character in the movie, a character that has little or no dimension until the end and no real motivation to commit the crime he does.
"American Beauty" cheats the audience out of the family tragedy it promised from the very first frame, in order to give us an easy villain to hiss. How am I so certain "American Beauty" went wrong? In an interview with "Creative Screenwriter" magazine, screenwriter Alan Ball said that in his original draft, the kids committed the murder, but in the aftermath of several killing sprees by American teenagers, he and the studio thought that was just too hot a button to press in this story, and so they changed the ending. With this film's obvious intelligence and style, I would have liked to have seen it follow through with its intentions, and give us the tough, tragic story it wants to tell. But it doesn't, and thereby, as good as it is in many moments, it fails.