Bob Strauss

It’s just not very fun or engaging.

Sadly, fun is a rare element on Pandora, as “Borderlands” trudges through its treasure hunt scenario and endless ripoffs of better franchises from “Lethal Weapon” to “Star Wars.” It makes you want to go home and blow up your Playstation.

The Watchers just doesn’t connect on anything deeper than a surface level. Given material that isn’t about looking at the same boring thing over and over, Shyamalan might have been able to really make something.

Like “Chinatown” with no stakes or “The Big Lebowski” minus the laughs, Poolman is a neo-noir comedy that shares just one quality with its superior influences: a palpable love for Los Angeles in all its corrupt, cruddy glory.

The good news is you can bring the kids. When it comes time for swimming lessons next summer, there’s nothing they’ll remember from this that’ll make them afraid of the water.

While many of the film’s action sequences are in slow motion, it’s the story’s narrative (credited to Snyder, Shay Hatten and Kurt Johnstad) that really crawls.

There’s a weepy turn in the sentimental third act, and why not? Nothing else was working.

First-time director Lindsey Anderson Beer and her co-adapter Jeff Buhler have some nice ideas that never quite gel.

If anything keeps “Red Door” going, it’s Autumn Eakin’s exquisite cinematography. The Further looks like a shadow reflection of the real world, and she and Wilson never fail to come up with aesthetically interesting and sometimes ingenious light sources to illuminate portions of it.

A distasteful, overlong slog, but at least the filmmaker appears to have put everything he wanted to up on the screen.

The film’s broad performances, undemanding humor and not-too-frightening horror are all designed to appeal to kids (and older fans of the “Haunted House” series). Adults are advised to enjoy the living Spirit Halloween aesthetic of it all, and remember that you love your children while enduring the rest of this hollow experience.

Credit to Hart, though, for trying to make every scene, comic or sentimental, as strong as he can. He reads each line that’s supposed to be funny as if it is, locates Sonny’s emotional truth no matter how ridiculous the scene is, and never lets his signature energy sag.

Defined only by their scars, all three lead characters feel generic, as if Werthman built them out of archetypes that ran through his case studies.