Gene Seymour

Drains the original story of its satire and juices up its shtick, schmaltz and special effects.

As its plot thickens, Waist Deep gets more outlandish. The whole mess empties out into an overextended car chase through Los Angeles.

Whether you care if they find them (terrorists) or not may depend on how much you've been able to withstand Bad Company's sensory overload of firefights, vehicular mayhem, techno-cool swagger and enough bumptious contrivances to fill several seasons of daffy prime-time soaps.

After a while, the only way for a reasonably intelligent person to get through The Country Bears is to ponder how a whole segment of pop-music history has been allowed to get wet, fuzzy and sticky.

If I were 6, I could enjoy Rebound without thinking about all the better movies made from its concept.

There's more than a little Oedipal melodrama tossed into the mix. But the movie rarely gets as sappy or as contrived as one keeps expecting.

Gadget instead ends up as another mindless, noisy thrill ride that gorges its audience on bright effects and leaves it queasy from overconsumption.

Where the first "Jeepers Creepers" came across like a dark, wacky dream, the inevitable Jeepers Creepers 2 seems more like a franchise under construction.

Righteous Kill's script is credited to "Inside Man's" Russell Gewirtz, and you wonder how the sleek, nuanced flow of that earlier movie evaded this one.

As over-the-top as Raven-Symoné and Lawrence are, the most live-action cartoon characters in College Road Trip are the father-daughter tandem of Doug (Donny Osmond) and Wendy (Molly Ephraim), whose nitro-powered perkiness pass the point of grating and move into a perversely antic state of grace.

There probably isn't another actress anywhere who could make that corny self-advertisement work. And there definitely isn't another actress who could make such an overbearing heroine worth watching for an hour and a half.

Shows less human dimension than the new Wallace and Gromit movie.

Its dark-edged crime-caper plot is so formulaic it seems almost ritualized. Yet Ice Cube and Mike Epps enact their standard odd-couple tango with such ease and brio, you'd think they'd never seen such movies before.

You'd like to think such bankruptcy of imagination means we've seen the last of these subterranean creeps. But you know they'll be back soon to collect their royalties from the gore hounds who apparently don't care how dull or warmed over the accompanying package.

As a full-service holiday movie, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause gets you into the mood to shop early and often by making the North Pole look like a shopping mall with a never-ending school pageant.

What Idle Hands lacks in originality, it makes up for in energy and insolence. It takes guts for a movie to indulge as much as this one does in proto-hippie humor and you find yourself tickled, in spite of yourself, by the movie's nerve, if not its jokes.

Certainly, Malkovich's portrayal of mob lieutenant Teddy Deserve (!) and his lacquered swagger represent the only thing here that you haven't seen a hundred times before.

So TV-movie-of-the-week that you wonder throughout why you can't use a remote to find a decent ballgame.

Stay as far away from Just My Luck as you can.

Every generation is entitled to its dopey, sticky junk and, deep into the winter blahs, they don't get stickier or dopier than Snow Dogs.

A dismal pastiche of threadbare plot devices and not-so-comic interludes.

Gallops along at a quick, easygoing clip. Grown-ups may have to scrub the sugar from their frontal lobes. But it's not about them, is it? Never was. Never will be.

Those 24-and-unders who are looking for their own "Caddyshack" to adopt as a generational signpost may have to keep looking.

Kattan and Ferrell do their best to fill out the shallow Butabis.

From the beginning to its very end, The Benchwarmers seems to be struggling to justify its own existence.

You'll be goaded throughout The Comebacks to think of "Bend It Like Beckham," "Remember the Titans," "Rudy," "Hoosiers," "Field of Dreams" and their ilk. What you also think about is how much this stuff worked better in "Airplane!" or "Blazing Saddles."

Like a dinner-theater version of the "Alien" movies without the good grooming.

Goes into a tailspin after its impressive setup. Its dramatic tactics become so tangled and diffuse that, by the end, you get the feeling that everything gets tied up too hastily.