Most overrated movie of all time

Rating: 6/10 (21 July 2003)

**Some spoiler**
I was excited to find this one playing late one night on Encore. I had heard many good things about it and I knew it was generally acclaimed to be one of the top 50 movies of all time. After watching it though I was thoroughly dissatisfied. There is truly nothing really special about this movie. Our "hero" (some may consider a villain) is the same guy you knew at high school who struck you kind of funny and frankly scared you that he'd one day violently massacre lots of people in some kind of one man holy war against the "demons" of the cruel world we live in. But I could accept that. the problem here is that he doesn't do anything. His motive for violence is pimps, senators, and scornful women (?) to save the world for prostitutes everywhere (?) and clean up the streets (?). All we ever really know in this movie is that the guy is crazy. How crazy? The kind of crazy that watches alka-seltzer bubble. So in the long run we don't even know how crazy he is or even what type of crazy.
The rest of the movie is him scribbling unintelligible ramblings about the few thoughts he seems to have during his 24 hour a day life and having the most ridiculous, absurd conversations that don't go anywhere. Since there are no witty characters (or even halfway smart) in this, there is absolutely no interesting dialectic at all. In fact aside from the "You talkin' to me" bit, there is nothing interesting ever said. This may or may not have been on purpose, but regardless it makes sitting through this movie a little bit harder.
In the end he decides instead of getting revenge on the girl who dumped him by killing a senator (?), to shoot down some pimps to save a prostitute who is acted by Jodie Foster (If you can stand, or even like, Jodie Foster you may not have a problem with her bad acting here) and he does so with every intent to be some kind of martyr for slow people like him everywhere. I got the point of the movie, it's about as deep as a kiddy pool. The point of the movie is we get to see partially inside of the life of a crazy guy who's not too bright and, since his character can be summed up in one sentence with few adjectives, also very 2-dimensional. And inside we see that crazy people are dangerous, especially when they're not too bright and scorned by women. This movie is decent, but far from even a top 200 list of movies in my book. I need a movie with a little more substance and a little better character development and script-wise, this movie would have been better done pantomime.