Joe Leydon

The result is a movie that is not merely disappointingly uneven, but irredeemably unbalanced.

Director Naveen A. Chathapuram and scripter Ashley James Louis, working from a story by Chathapuram and Doc Justin, have cobbled together a derivative and numbingly pretentious piece of work distinguished only by the relative novelty of a female lead (well played by Ali Larter) who’s as resourceful, resilient and, when push repeatedly comes to shove, purposefully brutal as guys usually are in movies like this.

One thing leads to another, at a pace that somehow feels frenetic and ponderous all at once.

Instead of persuasive verisimilitude and compelling character development, we get scene after scene of Jesse waiting for something, anything.

Dutch is dreadful. It’s a shambling, rambling recycling of clichés and conventions from ’70s Blaxploitation fare mixed with stilted murder-trial melodrama and half-baked morsels of sociopolitical topicality. But, really, to describe this rancid slice of ineptitude that way is to risk making it sound a lot more interesting than it is.

A gonzo mashup of gothic melodrama, Wild West survival story, and voodoo-flavored supernaturalism, with a side order of slasher-movie tropes and a sprinkling of kinky sex insinuations.

If Redemption Day were any more generic, the first thing you’d see on screen would be a bar code in place of the opening credits.

If Love, Actually had actually been as bad as its most vociferous detractors have long insisted, it would have looked and sounded a lot like this misfire.

Emerald Run is one of the weirdest hodgepodges to make its way to theater screens and digital platforms in quite some time.

As bad as Dead Water might seem while you’re watching it, it’s even worse when you replay it in your mind after the fact, and pay stricter attention to holes in the plot and gaps in the logic.

As tedious as rush-hour traffic and as bland as a communion wafer.

Being Frank isn’t very amusing, which normally would be the most damning thing one might say about an ostensible comedy. But that really isn’t the worst thing about it. There is something ineffably creepy about this contrived and mirthless farce.

The Intruder offers few surprises of any sort.

How late can a thriller spring a plot twist that at least partially compensates for all the cavernous plot holes, risible dialogue, and ludicrously illogical behavior that precede it? Probably not nearly as late as the makers of Replicas wait before introducing a third-act reveal that brazenly acknowledges just how silly things have been up to that point.

Unfortunately, Berk’s movie is too plodding and predictable to generate anything more than a modest level of suspense; worse, it lacks enough excitement to qualify even as instantly forgettable popcorn entertainment.

Paradox, a waste of time made bearable only by its brevity, plays like a bad acid flashback from the 1970s, a time when similarly self-conscious trippy pastiches of rock music and genre conventions proliferated on the midnight-movie circuit.

They Remain is a movie that lives down to your worst expectations.

The movie offers a great deal more mood than matter.

Even if you’re willing to forgive the laughably fake beards, the unconvincing computer-generated imagery, and a man-versus-lion skirmish that might have embarrassed Ed Wood, the overall clunkiness of this enterprise may tempt you to shout rude things at the screen.

Imagine a standard-issue romantic comedy drained of humor and suffused with sincerity, and you’ll know what to expect from The Competition, a ponderous trifle that plays very much like the cinematic equivalent of a 45 RPM record spun on a turntable set at 33 1/3.

Around the halfway mark, Desolation stops making sense altogether and spins off into the realm of free-form absurdity.

Forever My Girl is a sweet but slight romantic drama that got lost on its way to the Hallmark Channel — or, more likely, was rebuffed by that channel’s gatekeepers for being, even by their standards, entirely too predictable — and wound up in theaters instead.

If Hangman were just a tad less formulaic, and settled for a slightly smaller body count, it might pass muster as the pilot movie for a basic cable police procedural.

Some bad movies trigger swells of anger and outrage, while others prompt industrial-grade snark and scorn. And then there are leaden clunkers like Just Getting Started that provoke an ineffable sense of sadness as one considers how much time, money and talent has been squandered on something so thoroughly useless.

Inoperable is insufferable.

There’s a point beyond which it’s difficult to believe anything that happens on screen, and impossible to care what is supposed to be real or not. Unfortunately, the movie continues for a lengthy stretch after that, until it literally trudges into a deep, dark hole.

Gun Shy is the sort of leaden misfire in which actors labor mightily to transform themselves into cartoon caricatures in a desperate (and largely unsuccessful) attempt to make viewers think, despite all evidence to the contrary, they are watching a comedy.