Jay Carr

Lopez is not yet the actor Caviezel is. Still, she fills her performance with conviction, does a couple of her own stunts, and has enough star presence to fill the big screen.

It's amazingly suspenseless and devoid of substance. [05 Mar 1993]

Captain Ron is an inconsequential but inoffensive little comedy dedicated to the proposition that inheriting Clark Gable's yacht can be a real problem. A throwback to the plastic Disney family comedies of the late '50s and early '60s, it's at least trim and shipshape, if never inspired or original. [18 Sep 1992, p.56]

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]

Bait ends up seeming pretty wormy.

Flashdance makes liberal use of jump cuts, strobe lighting and hard-edged, post-punk chic in its dance sequences, it registers as the end product of energy being released by an essentially lyrical temperament. It charms us, makes us want to refrain from scrutinizing it too closely. [31 Jul 1983, p.1]

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]

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

The most fascinatingly self-revelatory Hitchcock film of all...Vertigo is so dreamy, so druggy, that when it does actually introduce a dream scene, it seems excessive, jarring. And if Hitchcock was able to pick up on Stewart's capacity for relentlessness, he also exploited that side of Stewart's persona that told America it was watching a decent, homespun, plain-spoken guy. Stewart's character gets away with telling Novak who and what to be because he is able to convince us he is, at bottom, an innocent himself - and a victim. [25 Oct 1996, p.C10]

Starts by cheating death and ends by cheating us.

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

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.

More than any of the sappy writing ever does, their collective presence reminds us that any church is about community. The film is tired and trite, but they're terrific, every last one of them. [10 Dec 1993, p.53]

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]

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.

There's a whole lotta latex goin' on. The trouble is that not enough else is going on.

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]

Scrooged is that rarest of contemporary Hollywood phenomena -- a Christmas movie with Christmas spirit. [23 Nov 1988, p.21]

Don't Say a Word can be thought of as a case of Dial B for Boring.

In its zeal to counter the negativity usually found in depictions of Mormons, God's Army eventually succumbs to overearnestness, sentimentality, and cliche.

Guncrazy, a film more about limits than about bullets, is a pretty compelling little pistols 'n' potency outing, and Barrymore's sprung teen is what makes it almost mandatory viewing. In her chopped blond hair, creamy skin, strong chin and perfectly curved jawline, she's Lolita with the safety catch off. [05 Feb 1993, p.30]

Appealing as he can be at playing loose cannons, however, Cage can only go so far before being mired in a script that generates stereotypes as quickly as it thinks it's knocking them down. [05 Mar 1993, p.64]

A-list soap opera, high-class and high-gloss.

Hell itself is going to hell in Sandler's new comedy.

The end is a long time coming in Reindeer Games and the dialogue is mostly slush.

A sequel whose time has come - and gone.

Supposed to be a cheeky little lark but instead runs a narrow gamut from labored to aimless.

Dogged allegiance to blandness.

The important thing is that the film knows how to make itself likable. It's executed with warmth and affection and a high enough energy level to keep it entertaining. [15 Oct 1993, p.53]

Every time the kid looks at a field of numbers and symbols that start jiggling across a screen to clicky music, but not jiggling as fast as his brain, he's exiling the kind of hero played by Willis to the scrapheap of history. [3 Apr 1998, p.D10]

Conspicuously short on the kind of texture that makes us feel we're watching real people living real lives.

The boldest thing about Cutthroat Island may be the way it maintains a comic tone as it portrays him as her boy toy. Things get pretty waterlogged on the island, though. If there's a fresh way to photograph buried-treasure retrieval, Harlin hasn't discovered it. [22 Dec 1995, p.60]

Trips early and never gets up off the floor.

It's a sunny, funny, fittingly cartoony blend of computer-generated 3-D representations of the flying squirrel and his pal the moose with actors.

An earnest but ultimately scattered effort to put Yippie radical Abbie Hoffman's best foot posthumously forward.

Even the valiant mastiff, with his soulful eyes, splayed crocodile teeth and industrial-strength jaws, can't keep "Turner and Hooch" from going to the dogs. Unfortunately, it's the kind of picture any self-respecting dog would toss back. [28 July 1989, p.29]

Although Rush gives the film visual texture, he can't give it credibility or metaphorical dimension. Color of Night is nocturnal, but not much more. [19 Aug 1994, p.49]

Bird on a Wire is pedal-to-the-metal moviemaking by the numbers. What it's got going for it is that Goldie Hawn is cute and Mel Gibson is cuter as they struggle to mate screwball comedy to a chase thriller. The pleasant surprise is that Gibson has a flair for light comedy and the timing to bring off double-takes. It's a relief, too, because little else in Bird on a Wire is fresh. [18 May 1990, p.77p]

Offers little in the way of pleasure, even to its target audience -- the easily pleased and undemanding.

Beneath its glitz, poses, and pub crawlers and club prowlers, it's an old-fashioned morality tale.

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]

3 Ninjas is a skilled balancing act, a throwback to Disney's old live-action family films, starring and targeted to pre-teens. [07 Aug 1992, p.30]

The problem with 8 1/2 Women isn't that what you see is what you get; it's that what you see is all you get.

Doesn't so much strike a lot of sour notes as fail to strike the right ones.

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]

A warmhearted, hardworking little comedy that owes a lot of its charm to its modesty.

Denys Arcand has satiric fun with the media's way of taking celebrity culture at face value and nothing but. Eventually, though, the film becomes what it's ridiculing.

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]

Sweetly earnest little drama.

To call Johnny Mnemonic a disaster would be giving it too much credit. Disasters land loudly, resoundingly. This one lands with a dull thud. [26 May 1995, p.87]

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 Guardian, based on a Dan Greenburg novel, is more suspenseful than most of the movies made from King's books. One reason is that Friedkin allows a certain weight of ominousness to accumulate, being in no hurry to let us know exactly what specific form the threat will take, or even from whom it will come. [27 Apr 1990, p.33p]

Branagh and Love's Labour's Lost all but will themselves into liftoff. They achieve it, and in doing so, they somehow make it right to our pleasure centers with their generous embrace of stardust and pizazz.

Mostly a screenful of nothingness.

It's a much better bad movie than the first one. It isn't often in Hollywood that a director gets the chance to go back and essentially remake a failed film but Lambert, refusing to let sleeping cadavers lie, gets the job done this time. [28 Aug 1992, p.50]

The script is a little too clunky to serve Ricki Lake well, and Richard Benjamin's direction is a bit too sluggish to disguise her limited range as he crams this romantic fairy tale a little too forcefully into its predetermined mold. [19 Apr 1996, p.53]

Botches the chance to delve into the personality of a complex, alluring, and free-spirited woman.

The flat tire of summer movies.

You won't feel raped by it, but you well may feel that it's too ideologically earnest for the porn crowd and too hard-core for serious audiences.

Slides instantly into the realm of the forgettable.

Revenge degenerates into a macho dance between Costner and Quinn, with the film chewing up and spitting out Stowe's character in troubling ways. [16 Feb 1990, p.89]

It is Close's performance that gives the movie its oomph and will leave adults with smiles as wide as the kids'.

Doesn't quite rank with the films that bracket Heckerling's pop-culture high priestess status

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

The question in Red Planet isn't whether there's any life on Mars, but whether there's any life in the film. The answer is no.

There are times when it moves into the guilty pleasure zone.

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.

In a season mostly given over to unwatchable movies being cleared off studio shelves, it's at least about something. And there's no denying the lurid urgency with which it jumps off the screen.

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

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]

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

A surprisingly warm and engaging entertainment - brassy, schmaltzy, funny.

Takes a vacation from quality.

Starts out as a somewhat weary farce of infidelity, but turns into something a lot more gratifying, namely a comedy of mercy.

Sadly unworthy of Douglas.

As cumbersome as most films in this subgenre, Angelina Jolie makes it watchable.

Even the presence of Walston himself, as the government heavy in charge of tracking Lloyd's zany Martian, does little to alter the inescapable conclusion that this My Favorite Martian reincarnation is more likely to find favor with the undemanding than the nostalgia-minded. [12 Feb 1999, p.E5]

The concept of Air America is refreshing, but its enactment goes nowhere fast. [10 Aug 1990]

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]

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.

Most bad films are forgettable. They go in one eye and out the other. "North," though, is the kind of disaster that leaves an imprint. Representing a total inability by Rob Reiner to tell a far from sure-fire story about a boy who divorces his parents, it's a "Hudson Hawk" and "Bonfire of the Vanities" for kids. [22 Jul 1994, p.68]

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.

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]

A flimsy sister act.

It keeps its promise to throw an hour and a half of lively entertainment at audiences.

The unevenness of what surrounds the star couple is indicative of the script's inability to muster anything more than intermittent sophistication.

For a movie that's supposed to be sex-driven, Jade has the sexual energy of a dead battery. [13 Oct 1995, p.42]

Being Human isn't totally devoid of the gentle Forsyth magic. But it doesn't have nearly enough of it. Even Williams can do only so much with an assignment that calls for him to mostly stand around looking bummed out - in quintuplicate. [06 May 1994]

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]

As he proved in his screenplay for Moonstruck, John Patrick Shanley has an ear for New Yorkese and a soft spot for eccentrics. Both are in evidence in The January Man, but what could have been an offbeat, original cop movie fails because Shanley can't meet the more conventional requirements of the genre, such as plotting, characterization and suspense. [13 Jan 1989, p.47]

The Fan isn't a strikeout, but it doesn't exactly knock the cover off the ball, either. It's more like a soft pop fly, taking its time before settling very predictably into a waiting fielder's glove. [16 Aug 1996, p.D3]

A little too shipshape, too eager to please, not quite as anarchic as the best comedies.

Isn't going to be a contender

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]

A high-impact, high-powered mess that raises the bar for over-the-topness.

Stumbles over its own clumsiness until it goes down for the count.

There are three main reasons for seeing Someone Like You - Ashley Judd, Ashley Judd, and Ashley Judd.

It's hard to find the movie unpleasant, but it's hard to imagine it causing any strong reaction at all.

Despite a few tangy black comic moments, Lucky Numbers' is bummer theater.

An example of a film that begins with a provocative idea and then runs itself into the ground with clumsy structuring.

The last word in good-time mayhem.

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]

Good enough, but only just. It's got the hardware, but neither the characters, the imagination, nor the resonance one had hoped for.

Degenerates into a lot of dull declaiming and attitudinizing, despite a sly tongue-in-cheek quality brought by a preening Stuart Townsend to the Lestat role he inherited from the utterly humorless Tom Cruise.

The film never drags, but one of the enjoyable things about it is its way of taking its time letting us get to know and savor the characters.

A well-intentioned but self-defeatingly manipulative film that amounts to an impassioned commercial for national health care.

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]

Never earns the rollicking life affirmation it's after.

Any ESPN commercial at all leaves it in the dust when it comes to imaginative firepower.

Certainly Loaded Weapon delivers laughs. It's just that you notice the spaces between the laughs more readily than with the "Naked Gun" fusillade. I laughed, but I laughed more at Joe Dante's sendup of schlock sci-fi a la William Castle last week in "Matinee." [5 Feb 1993, p.33]

Doesn't make nearly the ripple it could have made.

Never brings its potentially intriguing plot strands into focus.

Plays like a college version of ''When Harry Met Sally.''

Ham-handedly manipulative film.

Could have been a classy thriller. But all the Aramaic in the world can't save it from its own pounding slickness.

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]

There's no Passion in this psychological drama.

Dragonheart has what it needs at its heart - namely, the dragon. The rest of its story, about a disillusioned knight joining forces with the world's last dragon to help peasants overthrow a tyrannical 10th-century king, has a warmed-over quality. [31 May 1996, p.47]

2000 isn't about nobility and humility; saving the planet from evil collectors is what sells video games.

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]

A lame romantic comedy that is neither romantic nor comedic.

It's a small film, and a far from perfect one, but it allows her (Theron) to extend her range as no previous role has done.

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

Up in smoke, down in flames, reduced to ashes - choose your disaster metaphor for Bonfire of the Vanities. As filmed by Brian De Palma, it's "Misfire of the Vanities," the most wrongly conceived of the many popular novels brought to the screen this year. [21 Dec 1990, p.49]

Vampire in Brooklyn isn't a disaster. In fact, it has some funny moments. But it's a long way from being the comeback movie Eddie Murphy needs. [27 Oct 1995, p.57]

A sweet, visually handsome sermon, but it's too dramatically bland to convert even the converted.

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

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]

The images are pretty, and Gene Quintano's screenplay gets everybody from point A to point B, though with no discernible knack for wit or subtlety.

But then Being John Malkovich is a brilliant juggling act, too, brilliantly brought off.

The film is gentle and carries a simple moral.

There are so many wonderful moments in Trixie and so few films like it that you wish Rudolph had given it a few more rewrites.

Maudlin script mars teen love.

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.

At least hits a certain adrenaline level, and the stunts have panache. If you crave the ''Young Guns'' approach to the Old West, here it is again.

Executed on a pretty broad level, but if characterization is slighted, the ensemble is so rich, with such depth, that every few minutes another juicy turn keeps coming our way to divert us.

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

At least Dragonfly isn't contemptible or altogether dismissible. But it doesn't use Costner well, and it even more unforgivably wastes Kathy Bates.

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

Isolated offbeat moments aside, The Mexican mostly fires blanks.

Gallo has delivered a clever suspense comedy that, thanks to a taut script, creative direction, and first-rate performances from its leads, gives Double Take more weight than one would expect from a genre crowd-pleaser.

Plummets into the realm of ludicrous failure.

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

A sodden-looking film.

The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is a nonstop gross-out contest of absolutely no socially redeeming value at all, unless you happen to value laughter. Ford Fairlane is funny garbage. [11 Jul 1990, p.41]

See Spot Run isn't solely responsible for the dumbing down of movies, but it's part of the dismal phenomenon.

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

Should have been an inaudible man movie. Every time the characters open their mouths, they hammer it deeper into the ground.

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

Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte are back in Another 48 HRS., and so is some of the chemistry between them. But although this sequel is more amped up than the original "48 HRS.," most of the thrills are gone. [8 Jun 1990, p.35]

A reassuring little cheeseball of a movie.

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

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

Isn't even worth a glance.

There are laughs here and there, and Graham and Klein aren't nearly as grating as what surrounds them. But there's no getting around the fact that far from seeming a labor of love, Say It Isn't So seems merely labored.

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.

An exercise in excess, but it's the best of the month's crop of mindless films, if only because it jumps off the screen with acertain pop and playfulness.

Pretty lame stuff. Already it seems to be passing with the speed of light into the limbo of utterly forgettable "who-will-I-take-to-the-prom?" movies.

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.

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.

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.

Causes one to wish... that movies about the supernatural could make contact with supernatural script doctors.

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

It's a tossup as to which element of padding is more lifeless - the labored buddy stuff between McCarthy and Silverman, the empty comedy of gangsters Tom Wright and Steve James, or the lame buffoonery of corporate sleuth Barry Bostwick. As long as the calypso beat is on, Bernie staggers ahead, a pepperpot of zombie mirth. [10 July 1993, p.22]

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

Although the limits on Beverly Hills Cop III are pretty obvious, it's not a total write-off. Still, it's time to stop making movies about Murphy's Motown cop and start making one about Serge. [25 May 1994, p.69]

The best thing about the film is the way it allows Richard Pryor to rise above the demeaning buffoon roles he's been playing for the last few years and finally play a character with dignity and style. [17 Nov 1989, p.89]

Isn't as funny as it is crude, and isn't as crude as it is labored.

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.

Mixed Nuts is that cinematic oddity: a film that's pretty awful, yet almost perversely endearing -- despite the tiredness with which it plays out its labored jokes before bringing them together in a gooey Christmas ending. [21 Dec 1994, p.94]

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

The moral universe remains unsullied in this lite, lo-cal thriller - the cinematic equivalent of a fizzy summer drink.

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

His (Green) new gross-out comedy is crude and stupid, but just as often rudely funny. It doesn't so much push the envelope as shred it.

There isn't a scene in Cocktail that isn't cheap and dumb, and whether its camp entertainment value compensates for its contempt for women is a question. Cocktail makes beer commercials look deep, makes "Top Gun" look like "Hamlet." [29 Jul 1988, p.21]

A crass, witless knockoff of better films.

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.

Rat may be lightweight, but it's never cheesy.