Jay Carr

Under Siege is dumb formula stuff, sensory jolts by the numbers. [09 Oct 1992, p.89]

The sequel goes down the tubes by spreading itself across four time zones and inviting comparison to the original by spending most of its time back in 1955, where another mess must be set right. [22 Nov 1989, p.35]

Although we're only two weeks into 1989, we've already got a movie so resoundingly awful that it's bound to stand the test of time and emerge as one of the year's worst. [13 Jan 1989, p.48]

You couldn't ask for a better setting for a horror movie. What you could ask for is a better script.

Back to the Future III has no future. The reason is that it never works up much of a past as it sends its gull-winged DeLorean time machine back to the Old West. In effect, it goes back to the Age of Steam and runs out of gas. [25 May 1990, p.45]

Alien Nation quickly abandons any possibility of an equivalently fascinating world for the formulas of a routine cop movie. [7 Oct 1988, p.40]

It's two hours of slumming in a vision of hell hatched from bourgeois comfort. That, and not its unsavory subject matter, is what makes it bummer theater.

Cyborg is cyboring. [07 Apr 1989, p.34]

Phar Lap wastes its brilliant potential through embarrassingly inept acting, a cloying soundtrack, stereotyped characters and pedestrian direction. [13 Jul 1984]

Except for a few coups de style, Amateur is a screenful of cool nothingness. [05 May 1995]

Isn't even worth a glance.

One of the big problems with Romeo Is Bleeding is its voiceovers. Gary Oldman, as the crooked cop protagonist, drowns in them like quicksand. [4 Feb 1994, p.54]

A crass, witless knockoff of better films.

Village of the Damned has everything you want in a horror movie but the horror. [28 Apr 1995, p.90]

Takes a vacation from quality.

Consumerism is running more amok than ever, but this satire of it isn't.

Part of the reason Pet Sematary is so pedestrian is that its leads - Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby - are uncharismatic. And director Mary Lambert, of Siesta and music video fame, doesn't know how to build and pace her material. [21 Apr 1989, p.46]

Awful in ways that are just clever enough often enough to make it intermittently watchable.

Jingle All the Way packs into its queasy bag everything we've learned to dread about the so-called holiday season. If it doesn't bring on an attack of Seasonal Affective Disorder, nothing will. [22 Nov 1996, p.E6]

As a film, it's as crass and awful as the house guests from hell to which it so unwarrantedly feels superior. How bad is Madhouse? Bad enough to make a critic think that the similarly themed National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is art, right down to its fried cat. [16 Feb 1990, p.87p]

A lot of striking pictures in this would-be feminist "Braveheart," but a film that's pretty flat and earthbound because of the limitations of the figure at its center.

Meretricious without being entertaining, it's an easy game -- and an easier film -- to sit out.

A fatally insubstantial film.

The flat tire of summer movies.

This one, a comic vacuum, is close to amateurish. [22 May 1992, p.32]

Slides instantly into the realm of the forgettable.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is yet another factory product that plays more like a marketing strategy than a comedy. Like the other farces bearing the National Lampoon brand label, it's a comedy of obliviousness - family man Chevy Chase refuses to alter his sentimental notions of family rituals despite repeatedly being slammed in the face with evidence of how far short of his expectations they fall. Here, the word "vacation" is a misnomer. The Griswold family, headed by Chase, doesn't go anywhere. Neither does the film.

Flirt has its moments, and Ewell and Nikaidoh are auspicious additions to the Hartley rep company. But Flirt will appeal mostly to Hartley completists. [23 Aug 1996]

Virtuosity doesn't really compute, but there's going to be more of its kind of cyberaction, not less. [4 Aug 1995, pg. 51]

Lethal Weapon 3 is a big, dumb, noisy, comic strip of a movie that begins and ends in flames.

Even an experienced director would have his hands full making anything out of this script. Four screenwriters are credited, and as any movie buff knows, the more writers, the worse the movie. Nowhere Faustian, this one aspires to camp classic status, but lurches lamely into vile gross-out territory. [10 Feb 1989, p.48]

The only thing that keeps Cool World from imploding is that Bakshi turns it into a series of animator's riffs, with little explosions of toon action erupting like video game novas into the foreground of the story that isn't happening. [10 Jul 1992]

Road House is the kind of action movie whose rigging is so blatant that there can be no air of heroism about it. Although Swayze and Sam Elliott, in the role of his mentor, have the decency to look sheepish most of the time, there's no end to the cynicism and merchandising on screen, especially in the sex scenes. [19 May 1989, p.45]

It seems endless. It's also unusually crude and stupid, even for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

There are some sweet impulses in first-time director Marc Rocco's Dream a Little Dream, but it's a mess. [3 March 1989, p.47]

In the Mouth of Madness is firmly lodged in the armpit of boredom. [03 Feb 1995, p.55]

Occasionally wills itself to rude, crude life. But most of the time it's pretty limp.

The kind of comedy that takes the fun out of stupidity.

The tame, confused script eventually sinks the film, although Field shows skill directing actors.

Son-in-Law (bet you can't guess the ending) would be brain-on-vacation fun if it weren't so smug and patronizing. [2 July 1993, p.44]

Plummets into the realm of ludicrous failure.

Pink Cadillac, you might say, is low on gas. [26 May 1989, p.43]

But Skin Deep hasn't the energy level or the inventiveness to sustain the demands of sex farce. There's only one sight gag as funny, involving glow-in-the-dark prophylactics. There's also only one role that's sympathetic. As usual, it's the Julie Andrews role of long-suffering wife, played by Alyson Reed. One last complaint: In the guise of being unflinching about dancing on the edge of outrage, the film reveals a mean streak involving cruel things done to dogs. Skin Deep spends what seems like a lot of time living up to - or is it down to? - its name. [3 March 1989, p.47]

It's not boring to watch, but in the end it's too lame and too tame. [21 Apr 1995]

A lame romantic comedy that is neither romantic nor comedic.

For all its antic grasping it lies flatter on the screen than its graphic novel source lies on the page.

Isn't going to be a contender

Avalanches are nothing compared to the deadening touch of the stereotyping and audience-insulting simplicities in the scenic but brain-dead Vertical Limit.

It's a lame and painfully overextended satire of homophobia.

A reassuring little cheeseball of a movie.

Son of the Pink Panther is merely lame and labored as it huffs and puffs over a plot involving the kidnapping of a Middle Eastern princess, Debrah Farentino, from her yacht anchored off Nice. With frequent explosions taking the place of wit and style, it plays like stuff James Bond left on the cutting room floor 30 years ago. [28 Aug 1993, p.26]

It plays like a crude "Godfather" parody, the sort that might amuse as a 10-minute sketch on "Saturday Night Live," but curdles and collapses as a 143-minute film. [09 Dec 1983]

What the Hughes brothers have come up with is, to borrow another phrase from that bygone age, a penny dreadful.

The most dumbed-down mob comedy in years. It's the kind of movie you tie around the ankles of a stiff you're tossing into deep water and never want to see again.

Berlinger has approached Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 with intelligence and even a bit of thematic heft. But, frankly, the cheap thrill is gone.

Ultimately, the film's self-censoring will to sweetness and innocence is even more fatal than the flimsiness of the plot. [22 Nov 1991, p.33]

Staying Alive, the sequel to John Travolta's "Saturday Night Fever," plays like wet cement. [16 Jul 1983]

The screenplay, with its relentlessly schematic characters saying relentlessly schematic things, is so moronic that it makes you long for a documentary on the real Cape League.

A sodden-looking film.

In short, the film panders to teen-agers - but not smartly or stylishly. [07 June 1991, p.48]

Basically what we've got here is talent spending itself on something tired, pointless and unrewarding. [24 March 1995, p.60]

The New Age plays like "Night of the Living Dead," only with better clothes. [23 Sept 1994, p.52]

By now, Rocky of the drooping eyes and damaged brain has turned guru, emphasizing heart, soul and family ties when the evil promoter starts goading him and playing mind games with his protege. Stallone, said to be following Arnold Schwarzenegger into comedy, is starting earlier than anyone realized. [16 Nov 1990, p.78]

Sadly unworthy of Douglas.

So heavy and lifeless that you keep waiting for those three little front-row kibitzers from "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" to appear at the bottom of the screen to start goofing on it.

Bruce Willis appears to be one of those actors for whom there is no middle ground. His action films are either "Die Hard" or "Hudson Hawk." His latest, Striking Distance, is a "Hudson Hawk." It should have been called "Striking Out." [17 Sept 1993, p.51]

The buzz was that Fair Game reshot its ending. They should have reshot its painfully fabricated beginning and middle, too. [03 Nov 1995]

Nightwatch quickly declines from creepy to silly. [17 Apr 1998]

A sequel whose time has come - and gone.

Most of the time Ernest Rides Again is a one-joke - or, rather, one-cannon - movie, enough to raise grave doubts about the importance of seeing - let alone being - Ernest. [12 Nov 1993, p.47]

Van Sant winds up with disconnected, dispirited pieces that never come together and lift off the screen with a whoosh of sly high spirits. [20 May 1994]

The Bodyguard is a misfire. It's one of those perplexing but complete failures where all the ingredients show up, but somehow manage never to jell into anything convincing. [25 Nov 1992, p.35]

This time casting Sharon Stone as the victim instead of the predator, it's both sillier and baser than "Basic Instinct," but not as funny, or even as laughable. And it's certainly not sexy. Essentially, it's an industrial object, badly manufactured, filled not with hot stuff, but with the cold dead air of calculation gone wrong. At least no artistry has been wasted on it, although it does squander a provocative theme under its pile of softcore hardware before struggling to its limp ending. [21 May 1993, p.23]

Never having decided whether it wants to be comedy or a sentimental hand-wringer, it tries to be both and winds up being neither.

The real problem is a script from hell - or at least one of the dingier suburbs of limbo. Some scripts are beyond belief. This one is beneath it. [16 Oct 1992, p.48]

The problem in The One isn't the black holes in the universe, to which the characters refer at periodic intervals, but the black hole on the screen. The One is a zero.

Mostly plays like an artificial stupidity experiment. Zappy visuals aside, it's essentially a reactionary take on science, stemming from the movies' traditional belief that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and a lot of knowledge is worse. Think of it as Faust Goes to the Lab, with an ambitious doc serving as Mephistopheles. [6 Mar 1992, p.30]

A supernatural thriller that is neither super, natural, nor thrilling.

Maudlin script mars teen love.

Strenuously as it tries, and pulse-poundingly successful as the embassy rescue scene is, Rules of Engagement never engages us.

A flagrantly retro example of a tired genre that would vanish in a puff of smoke if anger management classes were to enter the picture, or if it would ever occur to any one of its endless stream of victims to reach for a light switch before proceeding into a spooky place.

This take, like so many Hollywood takes on French comic originals, is diligent, but, with too few exceptions, irredeemably soggy. [09 Aug 1991, p.42]

To be blunt, Raising Cain is a thriller that doesn't thrill. [07 Aug 1992, p.30]

There's no excuse for Her Alibi. [3 Feb 1989, p.42]

A few of the sequences are bad enough to be funny, especially the ones involving Sheen skulking around alien central in a red jump suit, falling down a lot, as if directed by Ed Wood. [31 May 1996, p.52]

The Disney people have taken such obvious care in making Return to Oz that it's a shame it didn't turn out better. It has its moments - mostly visual - but when it isn't a grim downer, it's largely inert. [21 Jun 1985, p.21]

Such an utter piece of fluff so conceptually barren it might as well be a music video.

Who's Harry Crumb? has a beginning bright enough to make you hope that John Candy might at last have his first good movie role since Splash. But no. Who's Harry Crumb? crumbles into yet another slack, witless misreading of what makes Candy an appealing performer. [03 Feb 1989, p.43]

Getting Even with Dad never allows us to forget that it's never more than a manufactured object untouched by quality control. [17 Jun 1994, p.78]

A Kiss Before Dying is another failed remake, never approaching the claustrophobic pressure of the far grittier and more highly charged 1956 version with Robert Wagner, Joanne Woodward and Mary Astor. [26 Apr 1991, p.72]

Gooding plays the worst role I've ever seen him play in a movie...he perpetuates a kind of black stereotype that should have become history years ago.

One could argue that ''Lock, Stock'' and Snatch are essentially the same movie - crime comedies marked by an outlandish visual style. Which raises the question of whether Ritchie has the range to do anything else.

Blurs the line between black comedy and black hole.

Full of atmosphere and visuals, it's empty of anything that really matters.

Despite its good looks and expertly turned performances, it trivializes Kafka and his work. The simplistic optimism behind it is more terrifying than anything we actually see on screen. Sitting through Kafka is like watching somebody staff a suicide hotline by telling callers to just lighten up. [21 Feb. 1992, p.28]

Fletch Lives isn't a total zero. Three, or maybe four, of Chevy Chase's wisecracks work. But everything else about the film is feeble and poky. Even its tastelessness lacks the coarse energy of vulgarity. It's hard to believe that the world has had to wait five years for this witless, insipid sequel to "Fletch," an original that's easy to top. [17 Mar 1989, p.45]

An abundance of style and an almost total lack of substance make Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together a visually arresting but ultimately unrewarding excursion. [31 Oct 1997]

It plays like a pilot for what I imagine will be network TV's first all-gay sitcom.