David Sterritt

Amiably bland actors can be fun to watch, as Tom Hanks has proved. Freeman is no Hanks, though, and The Hitchhiker's Guide won't boost anyone's career into hyperspace. Or give your mind a workout.

The movie is a mish-mash of action-adventure clichés, book-ended with lame attempts at psychological interest. Written, directed, and acted with ham-fisted heaviness.

Like the recent "Mona Lisa Smile," this tale could have been an effective feminist fable if it weren't so calculated.

Bataille was a serious philosopher as well as a sensation-seeking writer, but you'd never guess his provocative ideas from this updated version.

By the time it ended, I'd stopped caring. I suspect most moviegoers will do the same. Here's hoping Shelton scurries back to the athletic world in a hurry.

At 225 minutes long, it feels like a trilogy in itself. That wouldn't be a problem if it had energy and imagination, but those qualities are missing, as is any sense of historical or philosophical context.

The consequences aren't remotely as comic as they're meant to be.

The story takes place in 2013, but you'd hardly know it from the age-old clichés Kevin Costner purloins to tell this overblown action yarn, which relies so heavily on ideas borrowed from John Ford westerns that the Hollywood giant should have been credited as codirector; too bad Costner can't invest them with Ford's kind of life and originality, though.

The infuriating thing about XXX isn't that it delivers thrills and spills to moviegoers who don't know any better, but that its Hollywood hype reinforces the notion that brain-dead entertainment is what movies are all about.

Daft, excessive, boring.

It's picaresque, all right, but full of ethnic stereotypes, and filmed much too blandly to compete with the superb ''Black Stallion'' of a few years ago.

De Niro and Hoffman almost give comic life to this brainless, vulgar farce.

Most of the characters are one-dimensional, and Avary's over-the-top directing doesn't make them interesting for more than a few isolated moments.

Was this spiritless stuff really directed by Paul and Chris Weitz of "American Pie" fame? How the rebels have mellowed!

Paying homage to drug comedies of the '70s, Half Baked is high on getting high and low on laughs.

The plot is a shameless plea for vigilante violence, and the dignity of the black hero is outweighed by the ethnically marked evil of his Hispanic antagonist. Beneath its crisp veneer, much of the movie is a high-energy hymn to hate.

Lachow goes for cuteness and whimsy every chance he gets, missing a lot more often than he hits.

The picture goes for sentimentality rather than substance every chance it gets, and the cast falls right into its syrupy trap.

Stoner jokes, awful gags, and just stupid stuff equate to one bad movie.

Humans, it seems, weren't meant to tamper with some things. This picture makes you wonder if cinema is one of them. [14 Nov 1986, p.27]

The movie means well, but neither its emotions nor its performances ring very true.

Fans of unregenerate underground moviemaking will have a ball.

The acting ranges from adequate (Jared Leto, R. Lee Ermey) to awful (Lindsay Crouse and everyone else).

Everyone tries very hard to make the story sweet and funny, but the soggy screenplay defeats them every time.

Falls flat on screen, weighed down by far-fetched plot twists.

The satire is intermittently amusing, but Arcand adds little to the arsenal of standard mockumentary tricks, and the interesting cast doesn't get many interesting things to do.

The story is a string of sub-Scorsese clichés, and if engaging actors like Malkovich and Hopper seem to be sleepwalking through their roles, imagine how unwatchable Diesel manages to be.

The picture's real interest lies in detailing the villain's sadistic crimes, though, and this is rarely fun or edifying to watch.