12 Movies With High Rotten Tomatoes Scores That Are Actually Overrated

On the whole, Rotten Tomatoes can be a useful tool for audience members trying to get a quick snapshot of whether or not a movie is worth watching. At the very least, it gives you a general critics' consensus on a film, although whether that actually gives you a clear picture of your potential enjoyment of it is another story altogether. But for the most part, the movies that have a very high rating can be counted on to have a correspondingly high quality.

Is that always the case, though? Not quite. We've scoured through the website's top films and found a handful that — although they may be good, even great, movies in their own right — may not deserve the almost universal praise they've received. Are there controversial picks on this list? Yes there are. But the mere fact that we can have disagreements over how great these films are lends credence to the idea that perhaps they shouldn't be considered the undisputed champs of the cinematic arena.

"Air" is another in a long line of corporate biopics, this time celebrating the machinations of a Nike marketing executive who saw potential in a little-known college basketball player by the name of Michael Jordan (maybe you've heard of him?) and pulled off the ultimate coup in getting him to sign an endorsement deal. Matt Damon is charming in the lead role of Sonny Vaccaro, proving once again why he deserves his movie star status. 

But overall, this 2023 directorial effort from Ben Affleck (who also stars as Nike CEO Phil Knight) is kind of a soulless film, celebrating brands — and the individuals who prop them up — above anything else. And what are we to make of the strangely prescient, extended montage of Michael Jordan's future career in the climatic pitch session? None of it's bad, per se, but "Air" seems to take our hero worship of both Michael Jordan and Nike for granted, assuming that because they're both familiar entities in popular culture that the audience's emotional attachment doesn't have to be earned. And maybe that's the case — but we'd still like a little wooing.

To be fair, there's no such thing (so far) as a bad "Toy Story" movie. But we can probably all agree that "Toy Story 3," which sees a teenage Andy heading off to college and passing on his beloved toys to young Bonnie, ties up the franchise in such a nice little bow that they could have just ended things there. 

Instead, 2019's "Toy Story 4" gives us a strange little story where the toys — and Woody (Tom Hanks) in particular — contemplate the idea of becoming free-range rather than finding their way back to Bonnie. After all this time being there for the kids in their lives, maybe it's time for them to begin to live for themselves. (As ever, the narrative of the toys always serves as much more of a metaphor for the parental experience than anything else.) 

While that's fully valid, it is kind of a bummer to see Woody become disillusioned with the idea of belonging to a little kid, rejecting the emotional intimacy of that relationship in favor of something less meaningful. It's especially jarring after watching him wax poetically about how important it is for the toys to be there for their child rather than seek the personal glory of being the favorite, only to do an about-face as soon as he himself becomes a neglected toy.

Would you be shocked to learn that 2011's "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2" has a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes, the same number as "The Godfather Part II"? We certainly were. While all of the "Harry Potter" films are perfectly acceptable adaptations of the original book series (although some "Potter" movies are better than others), both parts of "Deathly Hallows" seemed much more focused on wrangling the often unwieldly franchise to a close than actually being good films. 

This eighth and final entry sets its sights primarily on the Battle of Hogwarts, which sees Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) finally defeat Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) in an epic showdown with plenty of collateral damage. And while it hits most of the major beats of the book, it's visibly struggling to cover all the material it needs to, giving it a rushed feeling that dulls some of its emotional impact and denies audiences time to sit with its most heartbreaking moments. Also, do we need to even address the fact that Voldemort ends up dissolving away like a burnt leaf in the wind? Come on now. In the book he's just a lifeless corpse, which impresses upon the audience his startling humanity — and we will die on the hill of that being the better visual choice.

You know how people say that for something to be truly great, it should look effortless? That you shouldn't be able to see all the work that went into making it, but just appreciate the final effect? That's kind of our problem with 2014's "Boyhood" — it's impossible to ignore everything that went into making it. 

When Richard Linklater announced that he was going to make a film that followed the life of a boy and his family over the course of 10 years — and what's more, that he was going to actually film it with the same boy playing the main character, growing up in real time — the odds were certainly stacked against it. 

But the fact that he was actually able to keep the production going over such a long period of time with the same cast (including stars Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette), and to wrangle the footage from each year into a coherent narrative, is a testament to his skill as a filmmaker. But although "Boyhood" has its moments as a great coming-of-age film, it's difficult to escape the feeling that it's more impressive for the novelty of the behind-the-scenes story of its production than what's actually on screen.

"Hidden Figures," the inspiring true story of three brilliant Black female mathematicians (played by Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, and Taraji P. Henson) whose contributions to the U.S. space program went unheralded for years, is a really enjoyable film. But it has just enough flaws that it ends up being not quite the kind of material that should sit in the upper echelon of Rotten Tomatoes. Its representation of these three women and their experiences with NASA, as they faced struggles on the grounds of both their gender and their race, speaks to the twin bigotry faced by Black women throughout history. 

"Hidden Figures" is an aspirational drama that sees them succeed in spite of the barriers put in their way. But at the same time, it makes small concessions along the way that purposefully soften and dilute the message — like the scene where Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), director of the Space Task Group, dramatically tears down the "colored" bathroom signs after learning of the logistical challenges Katherine (Henson) faces in something as simple as using the restroom. Not only did that incident not exactly happen the way it did in the movie, but Costner's character is fictional. 

"Whiplash," the story of an aspiring jazz musician who is taught and tortured in equal parts by his toxic instructor, deserves at least some credit. As a parable about the dangers of unfettered ambition and the pursuit of genius, it works well, and J.K. Simmons as the teacher who spends most of the film hurling abuse at drummer Andrew Nieman (Miles Teller) absolutely deserved his Academy Award for best supporting actor. 

But "Whiplash" can also be utterly relentless, and although a movie doesn't necessarily need to have a "likable" character to be worthwhile, it might have helped to have someone somewhere in the film that we can root for. Simmons' Terence Fletcher is an uncompromising monster, and Miles Teller kind of always reads as a jerk on screen. That makes it tough to get behind anyone in "Whiplash," which produces more than its fair share of genuinely uncomfortable moments. And just as music benefits from having different levels of intensity and emotion, where it ebbs at one point and flows at another, it wouldn't have hurt "Whiplash" to be a little less aggressively scream-y throughout its entire runtime.

"The Departed" is a fun movie, sure, but is it a great one? Is this the Martin Scorsese film that deserved to win best picture and, more significantly, the storied filmmaker's only best director statuette? Probably not. Based on the Hong Kong crime drama "Infernal Affairs," "The Departed" features Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon as two sides of the same coin: One is a cop infiltrating the Irish mob in Boston, while the other is a mobster infiltrating the police — although, of course, the lines become increasingly blurred as the film goes on. 

"The Departed" has some strong performances, if you can ignore Jack Nicholson gnawing on every piece of scenery he can find, but everything is very surface-level and it lacks the interiority that defines Scorsese's best work. There's nothing wrong with "The Departed" (well, nothing except perhaps the ridiculous, heavy-handed ending with the rat), but when we look at its success, it's hard not to have a Michael Bluth from "Arrested Development" reaction of "Her?" Really, guys? This is the Scorsese film that finally wooed the Academy? Or did they just realize that they had better give one of our greatest living filmmakers an Oscar before it was too late?

For a long time, "Leon: The Professional" had a vaunted reputation in Hollywood, especially for the performances of Gary Oldman in the role of the villain and a young Natalie Portman as its pint-sized star. But although the performances themselves have held up, cultural shifts have made this film a lot less appealing than it used to be. It's difficult, for example, not to see its depiction of Mathilda (Natalie Portman) as exploitative, sexualized as it is and using a young girl as essentially a romantic co-lead. 

And its legacy has only been made more complicated with the allegations of sexual assault against director Luc Besson in 2018. His ex-wife, Maïwenn, who he married after impregnating her when he was 33 and she was just 16 years old, said in a DVD featurette for the film that the relationship between Mathilda and Leon (Jean Reno) was based on their own. Knowing all this, we can't ever watch "Leon: The Professional" quite the same way again. Even star Natalie Portman — who of course is blameless in the controversy surrounding the film — acknowledges her own complicated feelings about her on-screen debut in a role that was way too mature for a child actor.

Yes, "Top Gun" is fun. And yes, "Top Gun: Maverick" is probably the best possible iteration of a long-awaited sequel that does credit to its original cast while also introducing engaging new characters. Yes, fighter jets are indisputably cool.

But if we take off our nostalgia glasses (for the purposes of this film, they are aviator-style, of course), there are some real flaws to 2022's "Top Gun: Maverick" that aren't immediately evident from its high critic scores and blockbuster success. We can ask, for example, whether it relies too heavily on Tom Cruise's star power at the expense of the talented young cast who are relegated to the background for much of the film. (Think of poor Manny Jacinto, who had all his lines ultimately cut from the final product and only appears in a few brief shots.)

There's also room for a conversation about how much of "Top Gun: Maverick" is, like its predecessor, an ad that was bought and paid for by the U.S. military. An entertaining ad, sure, but propaganda nonetheless. Anyway, lots to consider — none of which makes "Top Gun: Maverick" a bad movie, but calls its status as an all-time great into question.

Okay, we know what you're thinking. This one is sacrilege. After all, everybody loves "Up." But we ask you (and you can be honest — this is a safe space), do we love "Up," or do we just love the first 10 minutes of "Up?" Because aside from a genuinely heartbreaking opening montage that shows us all the ups and downs of the relationship between Carl and Ellie from childhood to old age, there's really not that much going on here. 

After that high point, the rest of the 2009 Pixar film struggles to keep pace. The subtext is beautiful — Carl learns to forgive himself for not giving Ellie the life of adventure she dreamed of as a little girl, because an ordinary life with him was all she wanted. But the actual plot that's on paper doesn't match the elegance of what's brewing under the surface. It's got some great ideas, to be sure, and it usually ranks pretty highly among Pixar's filmography, but if you go back and rewatch "Up," we think you'll be surprised by how much of the movie is actually pretty forgettable.

There are a lot of films here where our objections can basically be summed up as, "Well, it's good, but it's not that good." This is not the case with "The Tree of Life," an outrageously pompous piece by director Terrence Malick that never comes close to moonwalking its way into a coherent plot point. 

Even Sean Penn, who stars in the film as the grown-up version of the little boy featured in the loose narrative surrounding a mid-century American family led by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, didn't know what was going on. "Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context," he admitted in an interview with the French magazine Le Figaro upon the film's initial release. "What's more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly." Terrence Malick's work has always been on the abstract side of things, but "The Tree of Life" takes it to an entire different level — and not necessarily in a good way.

Get your pitchforks ready. (We purposefully put this one at the end of the article, sort of how companies fire people on a Friday so they have the weekend to cool off.) "Avengers: Endgame" deserves credit for successfully drawing to a close a bold plan that was more than a decade in the making — a wild gamble on the part of Marvel Studios that paid off big time. Other comic book filmmakers have attempted to replicate its template, but none have quite managed to stick the landing. 

As a conclusion to a massive superhero saga, it works. As an individual film, though, it's got some pretty glaring flaws. At a certain point, it seems to trade in storytelling for gratuitous fan service moments. You can cheer all you want for Captain America wielding Thor's hammer, or a squadron of lady superheroes girlbossing up a storm, but that's not a substitute for genuine emotional resonance. And to make matters worse, the excessive use of CGI makes many of its action scenes a muddled blur, indistinct and dull when they should be invigorating.