David Jenkins

What’s most disappointing is that the raw talent is all there, and every single person involved here can be proud of having made quality, soulful, intelligent work in the past. It’s sad, then, that this chaotic compilation effort extorts their celebrity and has them make the subliminal case for an ongoing viewer journey that involves the purchase of a Switch 2 (or, in the case of parents/​carers, maybe having them consider picking up a Virtual Boy on eBay).

If you’re being generous, you might chalk this up as being increments above some of Statham’s more overtly schlocky outings, but if anything, it offers up less of what you want if you’re going to see a Jason Statham movie.

No-one has a clue what they’re doing or what the purpose of this slip-shod, opportunist enterprise is. The film pays such heavy and pummelingly-consistent homage to the unimpeachable 1984 original, This is Spinal Tap, that the whole thing starts to look unseemly and self-satisfied.

The plot is slipshod, the jokes are weak and the animation style offers very little to lodge into the memory.

If the spectacle of a film high-fiving itself from across the decades makes you feel physically nauseous, and one that opts for minor variations on a tried-and-tested formula over doing and saying something, anything even vaguely interesting, then hop into your busted blue Chevy Nova, hightail it past the Beverly Hills city limits and never look back.

Witless nonsense is still witless nonsense when it’s in quote marks, and following a strangely detailed set-up, the film lurches into a second half in which the kill count rises exponentially, alongside the feeling of skull-compounding boredom.

Jim Davis’ once-witty comic-strip creation is no slouch when it comes to commercial tie-ins, but The Garfield Movie somehow marks some kind of obscene apotheosis of this dark art.

It’s a biographical film where, to ask “why?” in regard to Marley’s sometimes obscurely-motivated actions would risk placing him in an ambiguous light. And so we instead trot through a series of highly manicured and stage-managed Wiki hit points and pause every few minutes for a musical interlude.

What we have is a completely fumbled, cobbled-together movie-esque collage of unwatchably fuzzy CGI in which ten thousand percent more effort has been put into making floaty underwater hair look authentic than it has to the script, story, characters, drama, attaining a sense of basic logic, meaning, etc… So no, it will not do.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes outstays its welcome big time – a serviceable B-movie which replays the series’ inherently-quite-exciting fight-to-the-death storyline, but then inelegantly bolts on an extra hour of vapid soul searching and lore expansion that made this viewer want to bludgeon himself with his own keep cup.

The film falls flat due to the fact that it’s a tonal disaster zone. It’s like paying entry to a funfair only to find out you’ve wandered into an open counselling session which is being led by a slipshod college undergraduate.

You watch this film not so much in anger, but with the shrugging, pitiful sense that each of its stars will be able to buy a new saloon car, or have their pool retiled.

In the face of creative genocide (if that’s not too harsh a term for it), we should neither be making nor seeing movies like Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.

The pungent whiff of designer cynicism pervades every scene, so not only is it difficult to understand why these diners aren’t taking their business elsewhere (which they absolutely would do if they’re the capitalist scum we’re told they are), but it’s difficult to give two hoots as to whether they stay or go.

It’s by no means horrendous or offensive, but it’s just a chronic bore, another film that will likely join the Billion Dollar Box Office club, but not a single person will be able to tell you how and why it managed to get through the front doors.