Charles Bramesco

This shameless shilling comes packaged in an equally offensive story that foists Hollywood’s au courant fixation with intergenerational trauma on to a character heretofore occupied above all with napping and eating.

Going mad with power should be at the very least fun, exhilarating in the indulgence of an artist’s most outlandish whims. Instead, Snyder’s would-be magnum opus is merely boring.

In film-making as in gift-giving, it’s the thought that counts, and there’s not much to go around in here.

When not being used to grind dull culture-war axes, sputtering impotent anger is a comedy staple. It just needs to be funnier than this.

The writing expends more effort on teasing out the logistics of seeing dead people than making the phenomenon frightening or emotionally resonant.

An attempt to revive the Hasbro franchise is a careless fumble put together without a hint of effort or interest.

Pugh’s greatest tribulation of all is delivering the tin-eared dialogue torn between the emotional sadism it heaps onto its protagonist and the adulation it lavishes on the actress playing her.

Clooney and Roberts remain masters of a dying art, mustering the flustered charisma that makes them appear both perfect and mortal, the same paradox we observe in our spouses and lovers. It’s a pity to see them settle like this, accepting less than they deserve, but it’s rough out there.

As this narrative advances out of the YA-industrial complex and into the harsher environment of general scrutiny, however, a whole curriculum’s worth of faults become visible to an audience not so readily pandered to, who want for more than worn-out teen-lit tropes to fill some inner content maw.

The saving grace here should be the win for the Filipino community, commanding a big-screen moment with a cast of undervalued Asian stars. But they’re all short-changed by a hypocritical sense of heritage and pride.

Like the hyper-aerodynamic train slipping through the night, the fight passages that should be the film’s saving grace come out textureless and frictionless.

The unfocused script from outclassed first-timer Ross never really follows through on what should be its foundational idea, led astray by underdone subplots and vague relationships between its characters.

In the carelessness of its slapdash construction, the off-putting flatness of its style, its brazen resistance to basic foundations of logic, and its hostility toward conventional humor that borders on the avant-garde, the new film (a term generously applied to this haphazard sequence of moving images) has far more in common with the hectic, ugly delirium of online obscurities than the newspaper’s funny pages.

An evident attempt to right the ship has turned into a calamitous case of mission drift, as a property with no identity travels in nonsensical circles, looking for a sustainable new direction.

A film that takes so many below-the-belt jabs at the idiocy of Tinseltown blockbusters must, at the very least, be a few IQ points higher than the stuff it makes fun of for being stupid.

We may never fully know who Brian Wilson is, but in his resistance of that knowing, we gain clarity on a crucial plank of his latter-day persona.

If this is all starting to sound like an ambitiously amusing fiasco, don’t be fooled: Scenes saunter by one after the other, their dialogue waterlogged with talk of “believing in the unbelievable” and other soggy turns of phrase.

Here, we can find a damning summary of modern Hollywood’s default mode – a nostalgia object, drained of personality and fitted into a dully palatable mold, custom-made for a fandom that worships everything and respects nothing.

On film, this story’s foundation of cynical button-pushing is laid bare.

Even if the combat choreography that made this vein of cinema so popular is up to snuff, and Winstead does handle her steps ably even as her character breaks down, this film should aspire to be more than a delivery system for a few solid shootouts.

The core issues of the film – its numbing swirls of rainbow light popping out every which way, the excruciating pop-culture catchphrases passed off as humor, LeBron’s stilted, if game, acting, the half-assedness with which it delivers the dusty moral to be yourself, the fact that it is unaccountably one half-hour longer than its predecessor – all seem minor in comparison with the insidious ulterior intentions that power this fandom dynamo.

Loeb mostly tamped down the lunacy endemic to an obscure corner of choir-preaching moviedom, and for what? No critical mind runs the risk of mistaking this partisan broadside for innocent edutainment.

Historically, of course, making no earthly sense hasn’t been a major impediment in Jodorowsky’s work. In this instance, he commits a sin graver than charlatanism by just being boring.

Watching a foot-tall plaything flip over a dinner table would be either hilarious or terrifying, and either direction would be an improvement over the flavorless slurry Bell is dishing up.

Flanagan’s sister piece ensures that its underlying meaning is as close to the surface as the shallow grave discovered in the second act. Flanagan chose to make Doctor Sleep utterly banal. Through means straightforward and blunt, he’s turned a surreal simulation of succumbing to insanity into a plainly stated reminder to always be true to yourself.

The admiration for a woman who knew so much about so much clashes with the unspoken assumption that the audience knows absolutely nothing about anything.

Taika Waititi’s self-proclaimed “anti-hate satire” “Jojo Rabbit” exists in service of a single idea, a notion so desperately idealistic that it lands somewhere between naïveté and disingenuousness.

This is the most insidious type of knockoff: the one that sincerely expects you to believe that it’s the real thing. Leave it to Netflix to take the fun out of incompetence.