What I love about this film and what I think Emma Thompson's screenplay, Lee's direction, and the actors capture better than most Austen adaptations is the portrayal of a society that has set up certain rules of behaviour and propriety for itself that it has a difficult time living with (especially the women, who are most bound by those rules). Some things are just "not done" and "not said" and so much is "understood" but must not be said aloud in proper society and the characters (and actors - they do it beautifully) constantly have to find ways to express themselves under those terms. The result is that small words or phrases or silences are loaded with meaning and/or double meaning (another result, of course, is misunderstanding(s) because characters must try so hard to read the unspoken or cryptically spoken). I love watching the characters/actors cleverly find ways to say so much to each other by hardly saying anything at all. (The horror of saying "too much," too, is wonderfully highlighted by Marianne's character, who says what she feels.) The film also highlights beautifully the hold that money/wealth had over the direction of these characters' lives and their relative inability to do anything to change their monetary circumstances, except by way of approved marriage. Most of the characters are subject to the whims of those who hold the most wealth - as we see in the case of leading women, especially. And Austen doesn't present a solution to the problem - she highlights it and criticizes it (the novel is more caustic in that way than the film as the romance and marriages at the end aren't described quite as satisfactorily as the film shows them): Marianne is "saved" by marrying wealth and giving in to the strictures of society (giving over her "sensibility" by seeing its unreasonableness) and Elinor and the man she loves are "saved" by the gift from a wealthy patron (the church living). (Elinor's "sense" is also rewarded by the film as the the safest course - the most in line with society's rules.) I could say a lot more about each of the other characters and how they fit in (but I won't). If you haven't read or don't like Jane Austen much, I'm not surprised you don't like the film. At face value, it's a rather boring romance, a chick-flick, maybe. But I do hope you give it (or, even better, Austen's novels) another chance someday. It really is more than it might seem in that it critiques the society it portrays with wonderful wit and sarcasm.
('Course, you might be like Ebert and think the film is not good because Austen's novel is not very good in the first place. I like most of Ebert's reviews, but in his Sense and Sensibility review, he really misses the mark by criticizing an Austen novel.)