April Wolfe

The jokes are thinner than the apparitions.

Banderas, who doesn’t get to speak a single good line, still manages to convey panic, terror and confusion. It’s his performance that allows this film to float at all.

There’s frightfully little atmosphere to this film — anything from creepy sound design to evocative cinematography — rendering the flaws in the story all too visible.

Throughout the film, the wrong characters are in focus, inexplicable close-ups abound, and Rapkin’s got the camera on rails, moving and panning for seemingly no reason.

In the end, the whole thing is a bit like one big golden shower pissing contest, with every male character vying for top of the trough.

What follows is something like Veronica Mars, only set in snowy D.C. and on heavy sedatives.

Compounding the manic energy of the editing is dialogue that muses mostly on long-winded ideas that don’t lend themselves to any kind of visual representation.

Nothing matters in this movie; stuff just happens.

This is one very ugly movie at its heart, not for how Englert photographed it but for how bleak and unrelenting the violence is — even that ending can’t dig Dark Crimes out of its dark hole.

With Lawrence (the director) and Lawrence (the actor) so professionally in tune over the course of three Hunger Games films, you might have hoped that the pair would deliver an off-the-rails, more mature action film with a nuanced female protagonist. But instead, they’ve delivered a lifeless peep show.

Outside of its actors, the film is unremarkable.

What’s most dizzying about this film has nothing to do with political messages; those are all too clear. Instead, it’s the particularly mean and bizarre humor that boggles the mind.

There’s very little fun to be had with the camp of Bad Kids.