Liam Lacey

Though Lillard's excitable tone keeps promising wild comic adventures, the sequences are uniformly flat and humour-free.

Distinctly humdrum, The Last Legion, a boy's adventure story that seems to have been dragged out of the vaults of some early-sixties TV series.

As directed by Bob Giraldi, well-known for his work in rock videos, Hiding Out manages to offer a brief catalogue of the cliches from both genres, before allowing the teen flick to take over. The film is essentially a series of comedy bits in the service of an MTV soundtrack. That soundtrack, which includes the first revelation of K.D. Lang and Roy Orbison's duet on Crying, may be the film's only creditable achievement. [10 Nov 1987]

A determined romantic comedy with a theme, and damned if it won't see it through.

Director Adam Shankman pushes together scenes with little rhythm or flow. Writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant ignore credibility, throw in pointless sight gags, treat humiliation as comedy and use tiresome ethnic stereotypes. In short, Diesel doesn't get the help he needs.

[Lange] does give the movie the only excitement it possesses -- the frisson of a hideous thrill -- but it's still an excruciating embarrassment.

Well-intended but maladroit, with a clever premise and cute animation that are undermined by the trite sci-fi parody plot and manic, unfunny banter.

George Huang's Swimming With Sharks purports to give us the goods on the big bad egos who run Hollywood, but it lacks both credibility and coherence. [06 May 1995]

Unfortunately, Siemaszko's performance is less tour-de-force than schtick-de-sitcom.[9 Oct 1987]

The dramatic justification for all this careless maligning of gypsies and lawyers remains as enigmatic as the film's title. The only sure thing about Stephen King's Thinner,in the end, is that Stephen King's bank account is fatter.

The high point might be the opening scene, before the stars arrive on screen.

The intriguing thing about The Peaceful Warrior is that nothing else in the movie feels haphazard.

Brick Mansions is a non-starter: It chokes on its déjà vu, the hyperactive Mixmaster editing is exhausting and the characters’ banter is so leaden it might violate federal emission standards.

Perhaps the major disappointment of Silver Bullet is that it never gets as bad as the beginning promises. From playing on the precipice of so-bad- it's-good, Silver Bullet bobs up to the level of conventionally mediocre- bad, and remains there until the closing credits. [12 Oct 1985]

There's a risk of taking The Brady Bunch too seriously but, please, let's not think of it as funny, then or now. [18 Feb 1995]

The most disturbing aspect of Cold Creek Manor -- a predictable, disjointed "Cape Fear" knockoff -- is that a script this disjointed and unoriginal could actually get the Hollywood green light.

Refn’s expectation-defying choice is laudable in theory, but Only God Forgives is a pretty awful drama.

The movie's dated, stereotypical comedy often contradicts its wholesome intentions, coming across as laboriously cutesy and occasionally perverse.

The lower orders seem to have been left out of The Lost City -- there just aren't any poor characters -- which for a movie about a workers' revolution seems downright slipshod.

All the borderline pantomime acting and wigged buffoonery is deliberate and silly, but The Three Musketeers remains charmless, a romp brought down by its lead-footed script.

A twisted, but not particularly clever, black comedy.

With its stilted dialogue, fragments of voice-over and over-busy camera, Red Riding Hood feels off-kilter from the start.

Some of the most memorable performances from great actors are also their worst: Add to that list Anthony Hopkins's turn as a sinister old Jesuit.

After six years in development, this comedy starring and produced by Adam Sandler feels as slapped together one of the comedian's live-action buddy movies.

The United States of Leland has a resonance of "Elephant" without the visual poetry or structural sophistication, or "American Beauty" without the leavening comedy, but it's neither an insightful nor well-made film.

By comparison to this effort, "Pineapple Express" seems like a model of thoughtful maturity.

Runner Runner is a bad run of cliché clichés.

The movie seems much, much longer than its 90-minute running time. [15 June 1998]

For about 20 minutes, Phantoms, based on Dean Koontz's bestseller, keeps you guessing. After that, it barely keeps you awake.

It's difficult to say who is more misguided here: the men (director, screenwriter and producer) who made the movie, or the women who signed on to play the parts.

A plot so preposterous it could only have emerged from the underground comic world.

Stallone's sequel has almost nothing to do with the original film except that it's about dancing; otherwise, it's Rocky IV with legwarmers. [16 Jul 1983]

They are singing the jingle in the bath, in bed, in the car, ready to send you, like George, smack into a tree.

The devil is back in Exorcist: The Beginning, and he is more disgusting than ever. Not more scary, just really yucky, in a kind of maggots-on-a-pizza-slice way.

None of this is funny enough to justify stealing 90 minutes of your viewing time.

There is one egregious misstep: the photographs of mutilated Vietnamese bodies which appear on the screen during the song, Time Is On My Side, which is grotesque and fundamentally dishonest. No major band has been less interested in politics than The Rolling Stones, and that's what makes Let's Spend The Night Together so infuriating. It purports to be about something momentous, but has absolutely nothing to say. In that, at least, Ashby's film captures perfectly the spirit of the Stones' 1981 tour. [11 March 1993]

While the pale skin tones (bronzer is selectively applied) and haphazard mix of American and British accents is distracting, it barely scratches the surface of Exodus’s ungainly artificiality.

The problem is that director Wayne Wang seems deaf to the tonal differences between coming-of-age, magic realism and children's comedy.

This briefly inspired bit of surreality quickly descends into gratuitous bondage, mayhem and dumb humour, marking the usual progression from mildly absurd premise to gratingly idiotic conclusion.

Dull Blade just doesn't cut it.

Both syrupy and scatological, this is a typical family-dividing Sandler comedy: Parents will hate it but the kids will delight in its rudeness.

Norbit is pretty much a bad-taste sinkhole.

Very little of it works.

Before immediately handing the movie an F and sending it off to summer school, give the filmmakers, and especially co-star Jason Schwartzman, credit for their anarchic willingness to try anything to shock a laugh loose from an audience.

Both cautionary and comforting (yes, some kids today prefer conversation to cybersexting), Men, Women & Children is as anxious to seem contemporary as any after-school special.

After a while, it begins to feel like a confused comedy: How to explain to the neighbours that your dead husband has moved back home?

The problems with First Sunday extend well beyond the hokey premise and predictable performances to the fundamentals of script, direction and tone.

All the silliest racist cliches are perpetrated: the dark people with their dark magic; British actress Cathy Tyson, as a Haitian psychiatrist who is occasionally possessed by demons and lapses into frenzied love-making; evil third world politics hand-in-hand with black sorcery. [5 Feb 1988]

The bafflingly unfunny and terrifically irritating new Disney version of My Favorite Martian is so empty that it makes the original TV show look like a lost work from George Bernard Shaw. [12 Feb 1999, p.D2]

As a testimonial to the powers of creativity and the imagination, Barney's Great Adventure is pretty unconvincing. [03 Apr 1998, p.C7]

Reign of Fire never comes close to recovering from its demented premise, but it does sustain an enjoyable level of ridiculousness.

The result is as off-putting as biting into a confection in which the sugar has been replaced by salt.

If you thought "300" was silly, think of 10,000 BC as 33.333 times sillier.

The results are so listless, dated and characterless.

It's the sort of visual joke you would wince at in a 1940s movie; to see it nowadays, you're tempted to dismiss it as unintentional.

Just my luck that I saw the trailer for the film several times and already knew all of this, which made the long-form version of the movie redundant.

A vigorously cross-marketed product, with comics, collectable cards, games and a television series.

The plot's not so hot -- it feels like it was jotted down by someone on an after-dinner napkin.

Serving Sara, which often feels more like serving time, is one of those tortured Hollywood romantic comedies that starts with a passable premise and turns into an inventory of flat gags and weak lines set against a travelogue backdrop.

You leave Stolen Summer with the feeling that you have watched acrobats stumble on a tightrope with no net below. Not a great show, but at least nobody got badly hurt.

Call it Nancy Drew and the Case of the Confused Adaptation.

Talky, crude and sexist, Mallrats is significantly less funny, a flatulent sequel to the director's small start.

A semi-intriguing abomination, the movie The Cat in the Hat takes a piece of classic childhood Americana and turns it into something garish, dumb, ugly and senseless.

Feels like a five-year-old with a megaphone, excitedly yelling about his latest bulldozer-soldier-dinosaur smash-kill-squash-everything game.

Is Kazaam racist? In effect, yes. But it'sracism linked to bad marketing: You can't really mix a black-pride rap film with a revamped version of "Free Willie" and expect them to magically jibe.

Riding that fine line between misjudged and deliberately anti-p.c., Get Hard is lewd, crude and rude but, despite its disastrous reception at SxSW, not entirely unfunny.

An Adam Sandler movie without Adam Sandler, it turns out, is not necessarily an improvement.

The script is definitely mediocrity mixed with complication.

This time the action takes us out of the usual campgrounds and girls in underwear into the realm of outer space, where no one can hear you screaming "Enough already."

Instead of story or suspense, Double Team offers a busy sampling of eye candy. [4 Apr 1997, p.C6]

The filmmakers have altered the premise from the unlikely to the ridiculous.

Mostly, the plot is busy and incomprehensible and the action sequences directed with all the art of a detonation.

There's no doubt the cast is driven and talented; some day, it might be interesting to watch a film about what such kids are really like.

General Boredom meets Major Tedium on the Civil War fields of Virginia.

Through it all, actress Posey strikes attitudes and preens across the glib surface of the film, and though her campy excesses are tolerable for a brief time, the performance becomes an exercise in overkill. [13 Oct 1995]

Some movies just bring out your inner Matlock: a desire to grab young punks by the lapels, smack them against a wall, knock their cigarettes to the ground and wipe the sneers off their faces. Such is the case with the callow and cynical The Rules of Attraction.

Isn't just ordinarily lame, it easily exceeds any normal requirements for witless sleaze.

Perhaps the best that can be said for Year One is that it aims low and hits the mark.

This one is headed straight for star Tommy Lee Jones's career-blooper reel.

Sparks’s preposterous approach has crystalized into cliché.

Phantom still an auditory lobotomy.

As the teenage new-waver in a land of corn-fed farmers, Bacon has an aggressive, nervous edginess, but is ultimately too limited an actor, or too poorly directed, to carry the leaden weight of the script. [20 Feb 1984]

The paradox here is that the message of respect for animal life is outweighed by the lack of respect for human beings.

Somewhere in literary afterlife, dear reader, Jane Austen has just rolled over and reached for her musket.

The film Dark Windows, by Norwegian director Alex Heron, manages to work in both forms of teen-o-cide in a film that feels like a Mothers Against Drunk Driving public service announcement appended to a slasher film, though that makes it sound more exciting than it is.

Land of the Lost is one of those films so caught up in its concept it has forgotten its audience.

The filmmakers have also advertised that their new movie eliminates the "Pow! Right in the kisser!" threats of spousal abuse that permeated the original series. The question of audience abuse has yet to be addressed.

At first so-bad-it's-good, then merely it’s-so-bad, Replicas’ source of interest is primarily forensic. How did director Jeffrey Nachmanoff and writer Chad St. John (London Has Fallen) think they could get away with it?

One of the most preposterous efforts by any major director in recent memory.

This is a no-cable, no-wake-up-call, cash-only dump of a film, where you breathe through a hankie and bring your own Lysol.

If you are expecting a pleasant evening of escapism, you will be cruelly fooled. The editor responsible for the trailer is clearly a genius.

The most gratifying thing about xXx: State of the Union is that nobody wastes much time on character, motivation, plausibility, dialogue or sex -- all that slow stuff that drags down ordinary movies.

What can you say about a film the comic high point of which is Dan Aykroyd standing half-naked in a bathroom while extracting hairs from his nostrils with manicure scissors? For starters you can say it's bad, as bad as a film can be that looks to National Lampoon's Vacation for creative inspiration. [17 June 1988]

Grade Underclassman an "Unacceptable effort," and "D" for derivative.

So intent are the Strausses on showing off their visual chops, they leave the film's story, dialogue and acting in shambles.

As coy sleaze goes, the new Olsen twins' movie doesn't match Britney Spears's "Crossroads," but it comes close.

The movie is so relentlessly self-congratulatory, you can't help becoming thoroughly sick of it.

The obvious question about Repo Men: Why bother?