most overrated film ever

Rating: 1/10 (11 January 2005)

This boring, overlong, implausible excuse for a story has psyched out a surprising number of people, thanks to a strong cast (Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken), phony but emotionally exploitive material, and American audiences desperate to demonize the winners of the Vietnam war.
Any scenes that might have shown combat, snipers, or something that could have really happened in Vietnam are jarringly missing - it practically cuts from Pennsylvania to a POW camp. Then the famous "Russian roulette" scenes are utterly invented, and never happened to anyone in Vietnam (and probably not in any other war). Any honest viewpoint on any war would be preferable. Nam veterans aren't fooled; they hate this movie.
Finally, they eliminate Walken's character in a twist that should logically have occurred many years earlier, but happens to take place just as his best friend arrives after ten years. Please!
The most amazing thing about this movie is how many people say they loved it. Somehow the alternation of pretentious slowness and violence is manipulative. Its success so confused its director that he became delusional and made an even longer and far more expensive failure, so infamously bad it actually brought down United Artists studio. Still, I suspect I'd like it better than The Deer Hunter.