Liam Lacey

This is a movie that was made not because the director had anything to say, but because she wanted to get a movie made. Even at that, the script is slapdash. Only one character has any dimension (Frances O'Connor's Mia), the plotting is the usual sub-screwball comedy with obligatory pranks and misunderstandings, and the overall tone is bland, smug and connivingly cute. [11 Apr 1997, p.C6]

A funereally unfunny comedy.

There's are nagging problems with the script, which feels like it has lost a few pages during its rewrites. Instead of an orderly, inexorable pressure of events, we get a surfeit of red herrings, followed by the rather uninteresting killer simply stepping out of hiding.

Occasionally a movie comes along that’s such an awkward compilation of ideas it fascinates: The Forger, a Boston-set melodrama involving cancer, Impressionist art and deadbeat dads, is only about half that good.

What "serious" means for young actors, as we know from Miley Cyrus's "The Last Song," is maudlin, and Charlie St. Cloud is no exception.

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

Just how dumb is Senseless? So dumb it even takes the fun out of stupid.

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]

In the life-is-too-short category, file Kangaroo Jack as a sub-Farrelly Brothers, dumb-plus-dumber buddy picture.

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]

Ronan, youthfully elegant as always, tries hard, but the material defeats her.

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

This is the sort of movie that ends up awash in sincere revelations, and not a moment of it feels remotely believable.

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 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.

For a comedy about the quest for inner peace, A Thousand Words reeks of desperation.

About as much fun as being given a wedgie and hung from the camp flagpole, Daddy Day Camp is an unnecessary sequel.

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

The film is a howler of illogical, overwrought emotion, inexplicable actions and sudden bursts of bloody violence. [03 Mar 1984]

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]

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

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]

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.

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 film is a mawkish mess, only occasionally alleviated by the performances or Shange's poetry.

One of those non-stop jabbering cartoons in which most of the lines sound like the spontaneous riffs from a couple of comics sitting around a diner.

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

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.

There is little here for parents, and not much for the kids. [17 Feb 1997, p.C3]

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

Old Dogs is offensive mostly because it wastes time.

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 crude if silly humour of the movie’s first 90 minutes is followed by a dollop of sentiment at the film’s end, resulting in a case of tonal whiplash... like a slap with a wet fish followed by a forced bear hug. No doubt Tag means to be a rude but heart-warming trifle, but it just isn’t funny enough to get past its awful taste.

The film moves from cliché to cliché and hemorrhages blood and logic at an alarming rate.

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.

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

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]

At 70 minutes, this groin and groan comedy seems almost dismissively short, but don't believe the myths you've been told: longer is not always better.

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

The script is definitely mediocrity mixed with complication.

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

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

The results are so listless, dated and characterless.

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.

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

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]

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?

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

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

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.

Every character is like the hyperactive rat-squirrel Scrat, and the audience is bounced around like his elusive acorn.

So what's Hanson exploring this time? His boring side, apparently.

The movie is pallid, bloated and light enough to evaporate from the mind 10 minutes after you leave the theatre. [26 May 1995]

By far the most horrifying moment in the horror film Bride of Chucky comes at the end, when you look at your watch and realize you're 90 minutes older than when the movie began. Beyond that, it's pretty much what you'd expect of a film about two killer dolls on the lam, racing from Niagara Falls to New Jersey with carnage, voodoo and Martha Stewart on their minds. [19 Oct 1998]

The only pressing burden in this deep interior world is the question: What in or on Earth is a cast this good doing in a movie this ridiculous?

Unlike Sacha Baron Cohen's rude semi-documentary satires (Borat, Bruno), I'm Still Here never finds a satiric justification for all this grotesque behaviour.

Pretty limp, and works far better in theory than practice.

This one's just painful.

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

A flawed fraud, a youth movie so disjointed, witless and condescending that it's painful to watch.

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.

Here's the kind of movie thriller that can make you scream (in annoyance) and bite your nails (to pass the time) and sit on the edge of your seat (ready to bolt the theatre).

A twisted, but not particularly clever, black comedy.

Unfortunately, it has the model of the 1939 film to remind us how lacking in delight this version is.

While 88 has characters who have lots to say about the history of white supremacy, dark money in politics, and the delusion of fixing a corrupt system from within, this is a stiff, artless effort that barely makes the transition from explanatory journalism to fiction.

Sometimes researching the background of a movie proves more revealing than the film itself.

Mary Reilly comes across as too much brooding atmosphere and too little story. [23 Feb 1996]

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

Compared to Al Gore's new global-warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," The Omen makes the Apocalypse look comforting and child-friendly.

A sweet and sloppy jumble of fantasy, sentimentality, comedy and soul-searching that feels like a sitcom that never got past the pilot stage.

Contrast this to "The Iron Lady," a film which managed to be both obnoxiously condescending and flattering to the divisive British leader Margaret Thatcher, and left those of all political stripes irritated. The Lady, devoid of either iron or irony, is merely forgettable, a much deeper insult to its subject.

The sharks are disappointingly not scary but they’re interesting-looking with their plastic torpedo heads and serrated-saw smiles. When they leap out of the dark to dismember bodies, they bloody the waters in swirling lava lamp patterns that feel almost peaceful. Or perhaps I’m just trying to find a nicer way to say dull.

There is no tonal consistency from scene to scene, swinging from domestic drama to farce. Most of the actors -- especially Matthew Broderick -- look lost.

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

The one thing that’s briefly enjoyable about From Paris with Love is John Travolta’s appearance. In a black leather jacket, with a shaved bald head and a goatee and a perpetual scarf to hide his jowls, he looks like a well-fed pimp or a gay bear.

A wearying spoof, the film, with its Regency-era setting, takes a smart, sombre drama and turns it into a juvenile inanity.

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

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

Perhaps the only scary thing about the new horror movie The Curse of La Llarona is the fear of mispronouncing the title.

The movie feels like a form of aversion therapy designed to take the fun out of dumb.

Phantom still an auditory lobotomy.

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

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

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

Sean Penn smokes, glowers and shows off his knotty naked torso in this vain, risible misfire of a thriller about a reformed killer, from "Taken" director Pierre Morel.

After the first five minutes of Down Periscope, though, you'll be more likely be thinking Voyage to the Bottom of the Dregs. As with Ellen DeGeneres's Mr. Wrong, this is the sort of film you expect a big TV star to do before he's successful, not after. [01 Mar 1996]

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

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.

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.

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.

Dull Blade just doesn't cut it.

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.

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.

Everything about Are You Here feels like a bottom-drawer script idea that was put together too casually and carelessly.

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 Art of Getting By is distinguished by a dullness that's almost akin to being in high school again.

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