The most over-rated film I have ever seen

Rating: 1/10 (28 December 2002)

Don't get me wrong. I love art, in any form. I believe the purpose of art is to provoke some kind of emotion, any emotion, be it good or bad. American Beauty is the story of a man changing his sucky life and the development of the repercussions of his new lifestyle. The problem for me was this: I didn't care.
If a film is awful, I will rate it a 3 or 4. If I said this film was awful (like people said about Vanilla Sky) then I could understand the accusations of 'you just didn't get it'. I like a film to challenge my thinking, and this presented no challenge to me. It did not revolutionise the way I see characters or anything in life itself (like Cube did). This film was not awful, it just lacked interest. So I gave it a 1 (purely for the fact that Scott Bakula aka Sam Beckett was in it). There are so many people out there who have sucky lives and getting off your arse to change it is a simple fact of life. Why make a film, wrapped in pretensiousness and coated with false impressions about a boring example of it?
I seriously cannot understand the amount of acclaim this film has received, unless the majority of people who rave about it do so so as to not be accused of 'not getting it'. The characters were unlikeable to the extent where I didn't care what happened. I was more interested in what was on TV later that night or what I might put in my sandwiches tomorrow.