Donald Clarke

With little of Crockett’s original charm remaining, the audience is left with a generic entertainment struggling to find a reason to exist beyond the need for more “content”. As soon seen as forgotten.

For all that flash and bash, it does feel as if we spend a lot of time staring at Chris Pratt looking worried and a Rebecca Ferguson increasingly bored of sounding increasingly boring. Too much dialogue plays like a conversation with an automated phone service only marginally more animated than the one that fails to direct you to customer services.

Too many bad ideas are juggled in too small a space.

The closest thing to a decent joke comes (I think) in a closing reference, at one or two removes, to a popular television show of the early 1970s. This bewildering exercise’s only other notable achievement is to make Willy’s Wonderland seem an underappreciated masterpiece. It really wasn’t.

Hoover fans will know that, early on, a catastrophe looks to upset the order. Nothing in the film-making suggests, however, this dilemma will not be tidied away by the time of senior prom. Who would want to live in so dull a fantasy?

So Three Days is no great shakes, but it is rarely embarrassing either.

If you want to avoid cliche and overworked influence you have come to the wrong place.

The thing is unremittingly dull and bland (not to mention cold, apparently). If it is good for anything it is good for providing deserved paid holidays to venerable older actors and their long johns.

There are plenty of reasons to yell at The Starling. The pile-up of dreary sub-country songs eventually takes on the quality of something the CIA would have played outside General Noriega’s compound.

Look elsewhere for virtual methadone to hold you over until the real stuff gets back in the supply chain. Just awful.

Rarely in the history of cinema has so much tortured exposition failed so completely to explain such an undistinguished plot. It is like trying to pick up the story through overheard conversations with nearby drinkers who have just emerged from a screening. Stop telling us stuff and do something!

A well-meaning, but dramatically inert biopic.

Unfortunately, the longer the thing goes on the less it ceases to be good honest rubbish and the more it expects us to care about the stupid, stupid plot. Console junkies will find themselves involuntarily hammering an imagined X button in the hope of getting back to the gameplay. No good. You’re stuck with this wacko BS.

For all its gimcrack incoherence, Madame Web – which would be nothing without Johnson’s charm – is a darn sight less pompous and up itself than the overstuffed Disney content.