Jay Carr

While Harrison Ford brings all you could hope for to the role of Clancy's hero, CIA analyst Jack Ryan, Patriot Games is a pretty routine, generic and on the whole pedestrian film. Considering the talent and obvious care taken, it's surprisingly flavorless. [5 June 1992, p.25]

The 'Burbs begins promisingly, as if Joe Dante is going to yank a Steven Spielberg film into Blue Velvet depths. Once the premise is laid down, however, the film deflates and empties with alarming speed. [17 Feb 1989, p.88]

Its pile-driving succession of set pieces comes at you with numbingly relentless efficiency, presumably in the hope that you won't notice or care how dumb it all is.

What saves it is that it's lighter than mousse and is animated by a handful of engaging performers.

'Trainspotting'' Lite.

Despite the heavy-handedness, isn't awful enough to be a hilarious howler. But neither is it good enough to become the tropical noir it could have been.

Lots of sex, but little joy.

Although Crazy People would have been snappy fun in the '30s, or really wacky in the hands of a Preston Sturges in the '40s, it's pretty flaccid and pedestrian in Tony Bill's hands, not crazy enough. Still, it's on to something with those parodies. [11 Apr 1990, p.43]

If you walk in with your expectations at a suitably low setting, you won't walk away disappointed.

In short, Nowhere needs more humor, more wildness. Its pandemonium is only on the surface - which could have been the premise of a really humorous take on teen chaos. But it doesn't push the envelope as much as Araki's previous films. Although it gives his pop sensibility a vigorous workout, Nowhere is Araki's Mallrats. [06 June 1997, p.D6]

The characters, in short, are never given enough dimension, enough chance to develop the individual tics and eccentricities on which this kind of comedy thrives.

Nichols is a director who cleanly sculpts his scenes, leaving no intention or action vague. Maybe he should have allowed for a little more ambiguity. [10 July 1991, p.51]

It's not that the film is devoid of honestly earned laughs here and there. The problem is that there are too few of them and that the film can't connect them.

A mildly diverting gay-straight odd couple comedy that has just enough bright one-liners to carry it past its plot structuring.

Frankly, Mermaids is the kind of movie that needs the strong personalities of Cher and Ryder, and is lucky it has them. They put the movie over. It has a weak script, and the direction by Richard Benjamin - who had two predecessors on this project - is so reticent as to be almost absent. There's almost no pacing or shaping to speak of. [14 Dec 1990, p.53P]

Red blood, white sands and a blue Corvette are the real stars of "White Sands," the slick new Roger Donaldson thriller that's more about its plot convolutions than its characters, and more about its visuals than either. [24 Apr 1992, p.85]

Blew its chance to be an epic drug opera. It's only nostril-deep.

It's all prefab stuff, rendered acceptable by the sunny dispositions of the performers and the Jamaican location shots. You really have to love bobsledding, or Jamaica, or both, to love Cool Runnings. [1 Oct 1993, p.55]

Ford and Pfeiffer deliver craftsmanlike work, but the film steadily unravels as Zemeckis tries to ratchet up the suspense.

It falls far short of the lighthandedness, whimsy and feeling it needs to override its slightness. You keep wanting to like it, to match the good will coming out of the actors, but the writing keeps shoving its fabricated nothingness in your face. [09 Dec 1988, p.36]

Efficient, but in the end quite pedestrian.

What Fatal Instinct seems to overlook, though, is that erotic thrillers such as "Basic Instinct" and "Fatal Attraction" do a pretty good job of parodying themselves. Rather than really develop any of their setups, writer David O'Malley and director Carl Reiner seem to think it's enough simply to cite the originals. [29 Oct 1993, p.51]

The best thing about the new film of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine is the machine.

In the end, it's much ado about not very much, certainly not enough to catapult Bass into a film career, but probably enough to satisfy 'N Sync fans.

The film is content to remain at the level of the mildly entertaining, with no real surprises and not much sass. [04 Dec 1992]

State of Grace is a high-powered, luxuriantly textured Irish gang movie that you keep watching, convinced that at any moment it's going to come together and really grab you. It doesn't. [05 Oct 1990, p.45p]

For all its Himalayan aspirations, "Little Buddha" is shallow and superficial.[25 May 1994, p.69]

It's too psychically flat and dramatically inert. Instead of reinvigorating a Hollywood classic, Burton only takes it to camp.