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?

The latest iteration of Sylvester Stallone’s aging warrior franchise, The Expendables 3, is proof that sometimes even your low expectations can be far too high.

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

Neeson maintains a certain doleful dignity as an action star who apparently takes no pleasure in his gift for violence, but Blacklight has little else going for it.

There are a couple of minutes of unscheduled surgery to put this in the sadistic fantasy genre of "Saw" and "Hostel," but mostly the movie plays out like a cheap survivalist copy of the television series "Lost."

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.

Fool's Gold starts flat and then deflates because of torpid pacing and flailing performances.

Every actor and actress involved seems to have been instructed to act as guilty as possible and, in this at least, they're entirely convincing. Not guilty of murder, perhaps, but of a really unfortunate career choice.

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.

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.

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).

Without Spielberg's technical pizazz, and with a gummy mixture of homage and spoof, Congo chokes on its own tongue in cheek.

A farce that fizzles, a satire that sags, and a dead-end for its gifted cast, Breaking News In Yuba County at least starts well.

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

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.

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.

There are people who find treasures in celebrities' garbage cans so it's a reasonable gamble they might want to buy tickets to watch their throwaway home-movie projects as well.

A hypnotic, black hole of a movie that sucks reputations, careers and goodwill down its vortex. Rarely has a movie that doesn't star Madonna achieved such a skin-crawling mixture of deluded preening and bungled humour.

A painfully contrived romantic comedy/thriller that may (or may not) have brought Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston together as a real-life couple.

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

This one's just painful.

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

At least Adams and Goode are always watchable, even when you occasionally feel embarrassed for them.

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.

Not quite repellent enough to avoid tedium, Hannibal Rising is both too familiar in portraying Hannibal as a Dracula-like aristocrat monster, and crud in its exploitation of wartime atrocities.

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

Torching “witches” is the one part of the story that has some historical basis, and adds an uncomfortable edge of misogyny to this otherwise empty fantasy.

Fewer heads in the film and more evidence of one on the director's shoulders might have squeezed a legitimate laugh or two out of this contrived juvenile carnage.

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

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]

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.

Like Jerry Springer, it's loaded with class bias, offering a condescending fantasy that sees the poor as exotically grotesque, promiscuous, violent, and spiritually doomed. [17 Oct. 1997, p.D9]

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

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

It's outstandingly obnoxious.

Listlessly directed by Julie Anne Robinson (Miley Cyrus's The Last Song) from a script written by a trio of writers (Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray and Liz Brixius), One for the Money is tepidly glib throughout.

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

The film can't be accused of taking itself seriously. Shot in 3-D, with lots of choppy action, a rudimentary plot, and plenty of CGI-shape-shifting, it comes in at a brisk, disposable 88 minutes.

After 90 minutes of diligently searching the premises of ACB2, no evidence of mass entertainment can be found. Recommend cancellation of all future similar missions.

Within this bloated fantasy hodgepodge, there are few grace notes: In the role of the creepy fortune teller, Madame Dorothea, CCH Pounder is evil fun. And a few special effects, including a Rottweiller who turns into a skinned hellhound, leave an impression. Otherwise, Mortal Instruments manages to occupy 130 minutes of frantic, numbing, activity.

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

It is sincerely, painstakingly and astonishingly awful.

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.

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?

Forget about "Saw," "Hostel" and all the other films in the new, notorious torture-porn genre. If you're looking for a really sick movie, check out License to Wed.

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.

Veers between crude and cloying.

About as endearing as unanesthetized gum surgery.

Mostly though, The Back-up Plan feels like a movie aimed right at the funny bones of four-year-olds.

A family movie with lots of CGI-talking animals and star Robert Downey Jr. hiding his charisma, Dolittle is a tiresomely chaotic concoction.

Death Wish 3 is a little like granddad yelling, You kids better get out of my yard, and then following up his threat by tossing a grenade onto the patio and turning the kids into human hamburger. [01 Nov 1985]

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

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.

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.

Taylor Lautner puts the abs in Abduction, but not much else.

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

Horror at Christmas might work, but tedium doesn't.

Anything but a seasonal treat. This special-effects-heavy, big-budget musical from expatriate Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky (Runaway Train, Tango & Cash) ranks as one of the most misguided children's films ever made.

To be fair to Curtis, Off the Rails is more like a Richard Curtis make-your-own-dramedy at-home game, with each character’s personality stamped on a card and they roll the dice to see which complications ensue.

There's a lesson behind Gentlemen Broncos , the new film from director Jared Hess: Don't try to mock above your talent level.

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

Reportedly, the movie began life as a short film, and if it actually ran for 22 minutes with a few commercial breaks, like a good sitcom should, Filth and Wisdom could be bearable. At 84 minutes, the movie feels both overpadded and underdeveloped.

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

Eventful, polished, and knuckle-bitingly dull, the 10th film adapted from a novel by Nicholas Sparks, combines fate, bull riding and some powerful Hollywood bloodlines among its young cast.

Somewhere between cartoonishly bad for comic effect and bad because the filmmakers didn't really give a damn, The House of the Dead is, at least, unpretentiously dumb.

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

Old Dogs is offensive mostly because it wastes time.

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

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.

Anyone interested in the contemporary debate between atheists and religious believers will gain nothing of value from the documentary The Unbelievers.

Dopey.

Everyone in the movie, of course, is anxious to see these comeback seniors beat each other up, except, perhaps, the viewing audience.

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

A funereally unfunny comedy.

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

Crazy as this might sound, it turns out that self-indulgent ramblings designed to put your children to sleep are pretty much the opposite of art.

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]

The script is a dazed, meandering, thing, involving drugs, pornography, neon-lit slo-mo, debauched starlets, car chases, soft-core sex scenes and loud gun fights.

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

Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, xXx) is no stranger to cornball excess but Stealth is his chef-d'oeuvre, a movie so audaciously preposterous and jingoistic it plays like a parody of the genre.

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

The Real Cancun is no crime; at worst, it's a kind of staged tribute to "Porky's" done by amateur actors.

Familiar in its outline but unusual in the details, Last Knights feels like a year’s worth of post-midnight cable TV viewing run through a blender and served warm for your viewing amusement.

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

The film is significantly inept even when Crawford is not on the screen. [03 Nov 1995]

Wayans will do anything for a laugh, and twice if necessary. If Carrey wears a broken front tooth in Dumb and Dumber, Wayans has two front teeth capped with gold. If Carrey sells a dead bird to a blind child, Wayans shaves the heads of a blind boy and his seeing-eye dog. [24 March 1995]

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

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

Director Marshall ( Pretty Woman) has created a comic drama so confused in tone, the actors often seem to be acting in different movies.

The product of a first-time director and writers who have no sense of scene structure or shape, or even a discernible sense of humour.

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

Date Movie is a good date movie in one sense: If you're still speaking to the person who brought you to see this, you just might have a future together.

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

Campy costumes can't disguise the incoherent plot, confused performances and lame script that send this star vehicle spiralling downward.

Brain-melting, head-spinning rank toxicity that shows no evidence of intelligence as we know it.

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

Unlike Griswold vacations past, the peril in which the family finds itself isn’t leavened by anything funny.

Not funny, suspenseful, moving or even offensive enough to want to torpedo. Just devoid of any conceivable value. [19 Apr 1997, p.C13]

Mind-numbing, soul-testing, character-defiling experience that offers not one nanosecond of comic relief.