Adam Markovitz

You will still be astonished by how flat-out awful it is.

Cooper, who looks appealingly wolfish in his expensively tailored suits, plays the whole thing with a dutiful, earnest expression lacquered on his face, his eyes misting on cue at the exact same moments yours will be rolling into the back of your head.

Most of the movie's action-horror set pieces play like lame Gwar music video outtakes, and Cage's signature mix of irony and off-the-rails mugging only works when you can see the actor's face. In Ghost Rider form, his character is just a skeletal automaton with neither a tongue nor a cheek to put it in.

A ho-hum series of kills and lulls so predictable that it doesn't even look like much fun for the sharks; when they open wide, they might as well be yawning.

Though it doesn't work as entertainment, this numbingly chipper rom-com (directed by Dermot Mulroney) might be of historical value someday as an A-to-Z guide to the genre's most overworked clichés.

Spectacularly poor judgment in everything from acting to costuming (Olsen's Harajuku-troll get-up is scarier than her curse) puts Beastly right on the cusp of the so-bad-it's-good Hall of Shame.

Lawrence's gender-bending jokes are played out, and his slapstick is wooden and slow.

An indistinct romantic-dramedy-ish something or other about the rekindled romance of an actress (Rachel Bilson) and her childhood best friend (Tom Sturridge).

Faster grafts that genre's style onto a deadbeat script and leaves it to Johnson - as deadly focused as a gunsight - to make it all believable.

There isn't a shred of subtlety in their clowning - or in any part of the movie, which clumsily shoots for operatic highs and lows. But with so many borrowed bits and pieces, the only feeling it successfully evokes is déjà vu.

No movie -- whether aimed at adults or kids or canines themselves -- has the right to be as tiresome and unoriginal as this action-comedy mutt.