Marc Savlov

It's all a bit of overkill.

Surely something more original than this could have been mined from the history of North America’s largest and most professional police force. As it is, though, Johnson’s film is just firing blanks.

The third time is definitely not the charm.

How much better this would have been had someone like Brian De Palma stepped behind the camera.

I'm beginning to suspect there's some sort of ancient, or at least post-Pearl Harbor, curse in play that stops genre-oriented Asian filmmakers from creating anything of all but the most negligible merit once they hit the California shore.

Utter rubbish compared to its 2013 precursor. Enter with low expectations and you might just have some rock ‘em, sock ‘em, let’s-ravage-Tokyo fun.

Split Second turns out to be one of those dreaded “so-bad-it's-good” debacles, and a marginal one at that. Ed Wood, where are you when we need you?

Super Troopers 2 is a movie out of time and out of sync with comedy in 2018. It might have managed the success of its precursor, if only it had been released in 2002.

An equally tired and wearisome buddy-cop movie that might as well be a forgotten leftover from the era of "Turner and Hooch." Now there's a film with classic Kevin Smith scrawled all over it.

Phoenix Forgotten is borderline generic, desert-set found footage that apes the aforementioned Witchiness and genre constraints to a snooze-worthy T.

My advice? Grab Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine and recast with Jimmy Dean.

A mildly entertaining reworking of the Farrelly Brothers' superior micro-sport parody "Kingpin."

In short, the character is a lot like the way Stan Lee first envisioned him, but the trilogy's screenwriter Steve Ditko would probably loathe this new, unsatisfying, and hollow-feeling entry into the new cinematic Marvel Universe.

Jawbreaker has all the heart and soul of last week's mystery loaf (a dish that made the weekly rounds at my alma mater, sadly). And like that unidentifiable bovine by-product, the film is a chilly, messy anti-treat, sweet on the outside, sickly on the in.

Ultimately, it's a long, incoherent mess of a film, enlivened only by the sure knowledge that the great Will Eisner's original is available to one and all at your nearest comic-book shop.

Neither as adroitly funny as Franken's comic routines, nor as notable as his conversion to the fine art of politics, this is a 90-minute "What If?" with no discernible answer.

A dead-chamber misfire, a hollowpoint dud.

Although it's great fun for the under-8 set and for those of us monitoring the chaos theory that is Nolte's career of late, this film is otherwise mediocre and features some of the most uninvolving 3-D CGI since "Clash of the Titans" earlier this year.

A 119-minute trailer.

Despite some briefly breathtaking, computer-generated special effects, Virtuosity is 95 minutes of unsubstantial firefights and meandering plot twists.

It works only sporadically, and more as a comic outing than as a vicious battle of sexual predation.

Spottily directed and lacking the dubious merits of even the Friday the 13th franchise, this is one slasher film that should die a quick and lonely box-office death.

By the time the closing credits roll, you're wondering if anyone else noticed that nothing made much sense.

10 times too much, a nonstop orgy of bullets, bombs, and booty that aims low and hits the bull’s-eye with enough firepower to sink the Bismarck.

Gondry's update of vigilante crime fighter The Green Hornet's escapades is above all an exercise in frustration.

The result is a somewhat functional blood feast for the exploitation crowd, but it's hardly a bead of sweat on the original's battered backside. Oh, and the score? Basil Poledouris' bombastic brass is still No. 1.

Possibly one of the dullest takes on a real-life murder mystery, this gutter’s-eye-view of the waning days of Los Angeles porn king John "Johnny Wadd" Holmes is barely as interesting as one of the big man’s films, and a lot less revelatory.

The script, by Adam "Tex" Vegas, ricochets between over-earnest romantic comedy staples and a noticeable lack of any consistent tone for Reynolds’ character.

Rings is an unfortunate and often incomprehensible mess that kicks off with a neat premise and then never fully explores it.

For one thing, Seven Days in Utopia feels an awful lot like Victor Salva's 2006 New Age uplifter "Peaceful Warrior." That film at least had the appeal of watching Nick Nolte play Yoda, whereas here Duvall simply seems to be playing Duvall.

You come away from Splinter feeling it would have made a far more effective short than the feature-length drag it is.

For all its genuine thrill-ride gestalt, No Escape completely short-shrifts its Southeast Asian players. There’s exactly one Asian character of note, a Kenny Rogers-loving tuk-tuk driver (Boonthanakit). Everyone else is a nameless victim of the equally nameless mob.

Neither as good as its direct ancestor (Michael Schultz's great 1976 hood masterpiece Car Wash) nor as clever as the original Friday, this is, to put it bluntly, all seeds and stems.

For the most part, this is strictly kiss kiss, bang bang, yawn yawn.

About as thrilling as cleaning out your garage.

Why remake Craven's original at all? Oh, yeah, I forgot: Reheated depravity sells. To avoid existential despair, keep repeating: It's only a remake; it's only a remake; it's only a remake.

Well-paced and featuring a game cast, this is still a yawny yarn that steals outright from Hideo Nakata’s seminal "Ringu" and the more recent "It Follows," as well as several of Blum’s own prior productions.

It's a mess, and one that even the pickled cowboys behind me found yawningly tedious, and that's not something I ever thought I'd be saying about a Sam Raimi movie with the word “dead” in the title.

Home may be where the heart is, but I kept wishing this poor silly girl would up and move.

Sporadically funny, the film seems weighted down, literally, with bulging, bulbous Murphys flatulating endlessly.

It's not a great action dust-up by any means.

The Collector feels like the final, welcome nail in the bizarrely popular torture-porn coffin.

Has all the sugar-injected horsepower of a 6-year-old on a Big Wheel.

It’s Brisseau's penchant for the flamboyantly perverse and the perversely flamboyant, however, that might have been best left secret.

Saw has its moments, and most of them are brutal in the extreme, but ultimately it's one tremendous misfire that will either leave you laughing or, possibly, gagging. Not what I'd call a winning combination.

Director Bender has fashioned a film without any surprises, though after the first two films, anyone would be hard-pressed to make audience members jump.

Forty-five minutes in, I was already glancing at my watch and wondering why the only lively actress in this film was playing the dead girl. Go figure.

The emotions are turbocharged and the topic is eternally relevant, but that's not enough to save Two Girls and a Guy from being a whiny, snoozy bore.

Much to my dismay this is not an unauthorized sequel to Abel Ferrara's 1979 East Village art-world freakout "Driller Killer." This is instead a dispiritingly mediocre tweener comedy from some very talented people who appear to be experiencing a delayed sophomore slump.

An exercise in unintentional farce.

It pains me to say it, but Afterlife, the latest installment in this seemingly eternal zombie apocalypse franchise, is considerably more entertaining than George A. Romero's most recent exhumation.

For fans, however, Saw VI is, pardon the pun, a cut above the rest but not, sadly, by much.

It's visceral bloodbathery at its most repellent, but worse than that, it's horrific like the aftermath of a suicide bombing instead of terrifying like the bomb beneath the table or the knife behind the back.

Truly, the greatest torture of all is boredom.

Eager to please, but it’s so lacking in real-world skate politics that it more resembles the chugging PG-13 mediocrity of Top 40 pop-punk-lite than the hard-core Black Flagisms of Peralta’s scathingly real doc.

It is, in a word or two, everything that Poe's tales and poems were not: interminable and picayune.

It's mediocrity at its most unremarkable.

It's a testament to Bill Nighy's cadaverous panache that this third entry in the ongoing exsanguinators vs. lycanthropes franchise (that's vampires and werewolves to anyone not weaned on Famous Monsters) is as tolerable as it is.

Like last year's "Lethal Weapon 3" -- another ridiculously uninspired sequel -- Another Stakeout starts with a terrific bang and goes nowhere fast.

Prinze, Lillard, and Biel are all pleasant enough to look at, but the film's Romeo and Juliet tropes are shopworn by now, and the movie gives us nothing else.

Indeed, the biggest acting coup here comes by way of Courtney Love, whose cameo as an obliging waitress is the best thing the film has going for it.

At its core, a very manipulative piece of work.

This new film version, sad to say, is a hollow shell of the original series.

It's the type of film that begs to be called “charming” and by doing so instead ends up grating.

The script, written by the three brothers, is ludicrous and incomprehensible, and plays cat-and-mouse games with what could have been some deeply funny comments on race, wealth, and, in one inspired changing-room scene, eating disorders.

West (Con Air) saturates his imagery in a sickly, sulphurous stew of rotten-egg yellows and oranges, making a mediocre picture downright repellent at times.

Works just fine for the first half hour or so, but quickly devolves into a case of too much affection and not enough affliction.

The result is a cheerfully unfunny low-brow affair which simply can’t compare with the many genuinely entertaining James Bond spoofs that seem to crop up every decade or so, such as "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery or the more sublime pleasures of Jean Dujardin in the "French OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies."

Cobbled together on what appears to be a very low budget, Glass shatters under the weight of too many comic book allegories-cum-history lessons, weirdly abrupt plot machinations, epically puny bouts of brawny fisticuffs, and a third-act bit of outright what-the-f**k-ery that gives even the lamest deus ex machinas a bad name.

Director Chappelle lays on the spook factor heavy in the first 30 minutes or so, but the film quickly devolves into a simplistic slash 'n' bash shoot-'em-up which goes nowhere fast.

Just as clichéd as its predecessor, and lacks the old-school charm of films like "Wild Style" and "Breakin’."

Yeah, this movie's a dog, but you can't blame the producers for strip-mining the same old fool-proof formula to death … and beyond.

While the totality of Jupiter Ascending is just too much for its own massive narrative heft to support, kudos to the Wachowskis for beating back against mainstream Hollywood by casting actors of all races and genders in key roles, something they’ve been doing since their 1996 debut "Bound."

Just watching the trailer for Oliver Stone's new football epic a few weeks back left me with a grating headache; watching the whole sweaty film practically put me in the ICU.

Co-writers Don Calame and Chris Conroy utterly fail to notice the wealth of black-comedy gold inherent in the very notion of sprawling supercenters and instead go for the dumbest gags they can find.

Selick is widely and rightly regarded as a master of surreal, dark humor, and wildly inventive animation technique, and Monkeybone is the first tarnish on his otherwise spotless reputation.

It all falls apart at the end, however, and in such a loud and abrasive way that it makes Brian De Palma's "Raising Cain" look like a model of restraint.

War, Inc. is neither all that interesting nor all that cool.

A dull, tired mess.

At least this excursion into mediocrity is relatively brief, although, as mentioned, a vastly shorter cut would be much preferred.

The Green Inferno feels like a retread of a retread.

While it’s possible that Annabelle might give a few audience members goosebumps, anyone who’s ever seen "Rosemary’s Baby" –or pretty much any film James Wan’s had a hand in since helming 2007’s "Dead Silence", the "Saw" franchise excepted – will figure out what’s going on within the first 30 minutes.

With a running time of 78 minutes, Awake is relatively painless, playing a little like a lesser story from one of EC Comics Shock SuspenStories – or a lot like Joseph Cotten's "Breakdown" episode of Alfred Hitchock Presents – updated for the Fangoria generation.

Another addition to Universal’s Pictures Classic Monsters arsenal of crap (remember Van Helsing?), director Shore, in his feature debut, displays a fine sense of pacing but little else.

Its kooky hybrid of slapstick gender jokes already had whiskers on 'em in Shakespeare's day.

Perhaps vice isn't what it used to be, or maybe Crockett and Tubbs just aren't all that interesting when removed from their appropriate time slot, but this may well be the dreariest and most monochromatic time you'll have at the movies all summer.

While past parodies like Airplane! and the marginally worthwhile Hot Shots filled out down time with slapstick visuals and spastic throwaway gags, Loaded Weapon is content to lumber along at its own boring pace: you end up checking your watch between jokes, and there's nothing funny about that.

Almost insufferably sufferable. It's a chick flick of the tallest order, with schmaltz galore and the sort of ongoing romantic hubris that practically screams, "This is codswallop, right?"

Consider this yet another nail in the Eighties coffin.

A studied but silly misfire from the director of the abysmal London Has Fallen that attempts to walk the walk without ever actually being a movie genre fans, or much of anyone else for that matter, would want to see.

Can barely limp to its final CinemaScope sunset shot.

The result is a goofy-weird mishmash of some pretty swell CGI creatures and some downright lousy screenwriting.

Fumbles on so many levels it's just plain silly. To paraphrase the film's tagline: The Thirteenth Floor: You can go there, but why would you want to?

Only good old Leatherface literally mirrors the festering cultural and political corruption of the era, and to the film's vast discredit, this hideous echo is never even noted.

Not quite loud enough to be a seasonal blockbuster, Mercury Rising is instead more of a dull thud on the action film map, fodder for Willis fanatics, and not much else.

Director Irwin Winkler and his cast obviously hope to shed light on the boundaries of love, and instead come up with a walloping case of the preachies.

A character-driven piece with a character who seems somewhat hollow.

I've always said, "If you've seen one god, you've seen them all," and Wrath of the Titans only serves to underscore my point.