Luke Y. Thompson

So desperate are the filmmakers to create a "hip" western that they try to cram it with action sequences that aren't very exciting.

There's no reason to see this film in a theater -- you'll hate yourself for paying full price. Plus, you'll need beer, and lots of it, to appreciate the movie properly.

The final showdown between sole survivor and killer is sufficiently well done that you wonder why the rest didn't measure up.

Not that there aren't funny moments in the film, but they're cobbled together so awkwardly that you'd never suspect the director had made a film before.

It's a lame Heather Locklear romantic comedy and a lame Hilary Duff romantic comedy all in one!

While not entirely successful, at least deserves points for creativity.

Ultimately, the film amounts to being lectured to by tech-geeks, if you're up for that sort of thing.

So how bad, in the final analysis, is Gigli? The best that can be said is that it doesn't beat out "The Ladies Man" as the most abrasively awful film of the past five years, nor does it top "Battlefield Earth" for sheer misguided lunacy.

That some of the super-visions manage to disturb regardless is arguably a testament to writer-director Stanley Jacobs, but he’d have been better off keeping this as his demo reel and showing whatever he does next to the public at large.

It plays like a parody of suspense movies, then occasionally becomes serious, then boring, then makes a jarring 180, then frustrates, then gets vaguely interesting again.

Less fun than "Cry_Wolf" and "Venom," if that's possible.

No doubt Fox wants to tap into those Latina dollars, but you've got to spend money to make money, and this shoddily cheap-looking product ain't gonna do it.

Hackman, playing it gleefully amoral, walks away with the film, for what that's worth...which is a video rental for fans of the actors involved. Yes, that's video, not DVD -- four bucks at Blockbuster is more than you ought to be paying.

Plays like a knockoff of Michael Bay's already derivative and much more fun "Bad Boys," only with even less plot. It also recalls the worst qualities of John Singleton's mean-spirited "Shaft."

If it had anything that even approached the vaguest vicinity of a plot, The Wash might be a cool diversion for a Saturday afternoon at the mall.

Mandel Holland's direction is uninspired, and his scripting unsurprising, but the performances by Phifer and Black are ultimately winning.

The movie is not without some appeal, mainly due to the fact that the whaling town of Taiji is beautiful to look at, and principals from the original The Cove, Louie Psihoyos and Ric O'Barry, gamely give interviews to explain that of course they want to hear both sides.

It would take the ghost of Stanley Kubrick to get great performances out of Jimmy Fallon, Queen Latifah, and supermodel Gisele Bündchen, and Tim, you're no Stanley.

This was a better movie back when it was called "Gossip" . . . oh, wait, no -- that one sucked too.

Assassination Tango is Duvall's fourth, yet it still feels like a first film; worse yet, it feels like a waste of an undeniably great actor.

Well, Sanaa Lathan's in there somewhere as the smart and sexy ass-kickin' chick, but it's really all about the monster disembowelments, which happen often.

If you peel away the surface of this movie, one is left with not much at all.

LaBeouf's got the beef, and his inevitably bright future may be the only reason anyone will ever look back on The Battle of Shaker Heights.

Duff isn't exactly known for complex fare, but even "The Lizzie McGuire Movie" was way better than this.

The film's finale is truly egregious, a laugh-out-loud combination of ludicrousness and sadism that someone somewhere probably found scary, assuming they never saw a thriller before.

Stripped of every major scary moment and restructured in what feels like a deliberate attempt to remove all suspense, this "horror" movie is now a domestic soap opera.

Standard revenge shenanigans ensue, with more boo-hoo numbers from Vin, who ain't up to it -- he hasn't been this lame since, uh, ever.

It's a mess, but it isn't as bad as you think.