David Fear

There are many reasons that 1999 is considered a banner year for American cinema. This attempt to revisit the type of fanciful, footloose and fancy-twee storytelling that helped characterize that cultural moment is a big swing, and an even bigger miss.

Retribution is not the worst of his thrillers/action movies — that honor belongs to either last year’s god-awful Blacklight or this freezer-burned turkey — but it does suggest that Neeson may want to consider retiring from the everyman action-hero beat for good. What once felt like a niche being expertly filled now resembles a formula beaten into submission, like so many nameless thugs threatening the safety of a tough guy’s offspring.

Love may hurt, sure. But it’s not nearly as painful as being forced to watch a great actor stuck in a bad movie.

There’s something incredibly deflating about all of this, from the waste of precious screen-talent resources to the sense that you’re watching the last gasp of an age-old formula. It is like staring at a bright, shiny epitaph for two hours.

Even if you view this as just another superhero movie, it still feels like a litter’s runt. We’d have been fine if this kingdom stayed lost.

It’s a disaster movie in more ways than one. Should you indeed look up, you may be surprised to find one A-list bomb of a movie, all inchoate rage and flailing limbs, falling right on top of you.

While we do not condone the excessive consumption of alcohol, or sneaking spirits and other such beverages into a theater, or any display of public intoxication, we also do not think you should endure Ambulance while being sober.

This is a movie that keeps going out of its way to be any kind of blockbuster except an actual Jurassic World movie.

It’s a bad movie, full stop. Which is a pity, because the pedigree looks great on paper.

Thanksgiving is less a movie than a messy attempt to coast off an oldie-but-goodie one-off without adding anything to the party. It can 100 percent go stuff itself.

This isn’t really a biopic. This is the Passion of St. Michael, rendered with great fidelity to and emphasis on both Jackson’s undeniable suffering and equally undeniable talent.

How can you recreate the first Ziggy concert in 1972 at Borough Assembly Hall, Aylesbury, and fail to evoke even an ounce of the moment’s dynamism even when you have the moves down? Does Stardust exist solely to make Bohemian Rhapsody seem better by comparison? Why are we still watching this?

There’s an art to making action films, and that artistry is as AWOL here as it is in the first movie.

Something vital definitely seems to have been lost in the translation, however, and what you’re left with is a retelling that feels deader than anything skulking around the shadows.

What you’re left with is something that wants the brand-name recognition of being a Spider-Man project by proxy, but also wants to give you an overly violent, extremely gory vigilante movie that, despite featuring Kraven fighting a weak-tea CGI version of another well-known Marvel villain, has nothing to do with those films. Congratulations on failing twice, we guess?

At one point, a character is forced to stand in front of an automatic football launcher and take a series of pigskins to the cranium, each of which is shot at him with increasing speed. And by the end of this mess, you’re left thinking: I now know exactly how that guy felt.

Regardless of whether you’ve ever played Minecraft or not, you’ll recognize the kind of endless ribbing, nudging, winking knowingness on display here; this is steeped in the self-aware absurdism of, say, those Old Spice commercials that aim to confuse and confound in the name of moving products off store shelves. A Minecraft Movie is essentially a 101-minute version of that.

Not even J-Law off the nice-young-lady leash can save something this lazy and desperate to offend, however. The movie simply isn’t on her level. Or really much of any level at all.

When continuity and plot logic are AWOL in your movie, who ya gonna call? Not these folks.

OK, so, listen: There’s really no point describing what happens, or how, or when, or why. This is not a narrative film. This is not “cinema,” or maybe it is, who the f**k knows anymore? This is a Michael Bay movie.

It doesn’t take long to realize that what was meant to be a franchise-starter is, unlike its hero, permanently DOA.

This Snow White may not be the worst live-action adaptation of an animated touchstone, though it’s a strong contender for its blandest. The movie does earn points as a bedtime story, however, because it will definitely put you to sleep.

Even before the murderer is revealed, you’ll recognize the method in which the movie dispatches its victims: They, like us, were probably bored to death.

On the page, the limitations somehow feel groundbreaking and expansive. Onscreen, the film somehow reduces the same notion of one angle/one thousand different moments to little more than a blinkered gimmick.

The movie may be so scared of being an Auto-Tuned biopic that it settles for simply being out of tune altogether.

Plane is, in essence, the Frontier Airlines of action films: It’s cut-rate to a fault, makes you endure a lot of unpleasantness on the way to its final destination, and still leaves you with the distinct feeling that you didn’t even get what you paid for.

The problem with setting a familiar story in a foreign universe is that you have to establish the parameters of said universe or risk losing your audience. That's world-building 101, folks. Bright does not care about that. Bright's attitude is closer to "fuck you for not somehow keeping up with our cool shit" before doing a lot of push-ups.

Well, it's a little confusing. And slightly incoherent in terms of how it lays out the book's narrative about a serial killer who is targeting mothers and whose calling card is a snowman. And sort of not very good overall. It's bad.