Rotten Tomatoes has named the 300 greatest movies ever made, and according to its stats, Martin Scorsese’s groundbreaking masterpiece Taxi Driver is the worst film on the list. The list is mostly made up of the usual suspects, from Casablanca to The Godfather to Schindler’s List. But it also includes some strange choices. The 400 Blows is ranked below Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Citizen Kane is ranked below Zootopia. This list names L.A. Confidential as the greatest film ever made (it’s a great little crime thriller, but it doesn’t usually get the top spot).
This list, dubbed “Rotten Tomatoes’ 300 Best Movies of All Time,” compiles a selection of films hand-picked as the very best by a merry band of Tomatometer-approved critics and Rotten Tomatoes users. From Alfred Hitchcock to Stanley Kubrick to Steven Spielberg, the works of all the great filmmakers have been recognized on this list. But one key statistic weirdly ranks one of Scorsese’s greatest movies as the worst entry on the list.
Taking the #284 spot, Scorsese’s 1976 neo-noir masterpiece Taxi Driver is ranked pretty low on Rotten Tomatoes’ list. And despite placing 16 spots above the bottom ranking, it’s technically named as the worst film on the list, because it has the lowest RT critics’ score out of all 300 selected movies. It has an 89% rating on the Tomatometer, which is a great score indicating near-universal acclaim, but it is lower than the scores of all the other movies on the list.
It’s a little weird to see Air and The LEGO Movie being listed as better movies than Taxi Driver, because Taxi Driver is a landmark piece of filmmaking. In 1976, Taxi Driver blazed the trail for New Hollywood’s gritty reinvention of American cinema. It flipped the then-popular vigilante genre on its head by depicting its eponymous antihero as a disturbed mind, not a triumphant hero like Death Wish’s Paul Kersey. All these years later, Taxi Driver still holds up as one of Scorsese’s finest efforts.
Robert De Niro gives a deeply unsettling and profoundly vulnerable performance as Travis Bickle. Scorsese’s camera captures the ugly side of New York City – a lawless cesspool of crime and corruption – through moody B-roll and poignant visual symbolism. Taxi Driver deserves a spot in the top 10, not the bottom 20. It’s not the only Scorsese film on the list; his rapid-paced mob epic Goodfellas is ranked deservingly high up at #45, while his unflinchingly brutal boxing biopic Raging Bull is ranked even lower than Taxi Driver at #293, another case of RT’s flawed algorithm skewing the results.
Source: Rotten Tomatoes