The film “There Will Be Blood” appeared on several “best of the decade” lists I read so, having missed it when it came out, I rented it last weekend.

My question is simple: Really?

Daniel Day-Lewis ably chews a lot of scenery in the lead role, but my guess is there’s a reason almost no one had ever heard of the book the film was based on — “Oil” by Upton Sinclair: The story’s not very interesting.

Even at the time most critics hailed it as a masterpiece.

I’ve found only two “meh” reviews. Stephanie Zecharek’s assessment in Salon –

“There Will Be Blood” only pretends to be elemental and raw: It’s really tempered and wrought, to the point of dullness. I… There are epic impulses everywhere you look in “There Will Be Blood”; what’s missing is character development, focused storytelling and, most significantly (apart from that terrific opening sequence), any sense of raw, intuitive drama. An epic has to expand as it proceeds; this one narrows. The movie has eloquence but no guts. Its vigor is the arty kind….

…and Mick LaSalle’s review in the San Francisco Chronicle

“There Will Be Blood” derails into grand gestures and deliberate perversity. The finish is not quite as bad as having Anderson pop out from behind the curtain to announce the previous two hours have been a joke. … (Day-Lewis’ character Daniel) Plainview has only one rival in his world – a sanctimonious preacher, Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano. The uneasy interaction between God and secular commerce is the film’s most important recurring notion. It’s where “There Will Be Blood” could have had something definite and compelling to say, but instead it’s precisely there that we find the film’s Achilles’ heel. Anderson doesn’t take the religious mind seriously enough to understand it, leaving Dano to play a generalized character who is somewhere between a freak and a phony. The scenes between Day-Lewis and Dano ultimately degenerate into a ridiculous burlesque…

There should be no need to pretend “There Will Be Blood” is a masterpiece just because (writer-director Paul Thomas) Anderson sincerely tried to make it one.

But most of them — and most of you? — felt otherwise. What did these critics and I miss?

Anyway, my second question involves a spoiler of the movie “Up in the Air,” which my wife and I also saw last weekend, so I’ll put it after the jump: