Mark Jenkins

First-time feature director Peter Billingsley could have enlivened the action with more vigorous editing. Everything takes too long, and the slapstick sequences are particularly lethargic.

Indeed, despite occasional attempts at plot and character, this is basically a roast with scenery.

The new Red Dawn's body count is as high as its predecessor's. But the fatalism in all of Milius' projects - even the silliest ones - has weight. That's not the case with the remake, whose portrayal of violence derives more from video games than from history.

Jesse's nobility is one of the primary reasons Liberal Arts is so hard to take.

Style can be a risky thing in a movie like this, which aspires above all to inoffensiveness. Originally titled "Playing the Field," which was deemed too racy, this rom-com would have been more aptly renamed "Running Out the Clock."

Most of the time, though, the movie is too busy being saucy or sappy to even look at its target.

At every turn, the movie is less moving than the real-life events that inspired it.

As the loosely aligned band of survivors turns into a pack of sociopathic loners, the only reasonable conclusion is that they were all pretty rotten to begin with.

The movie is so flimsy that people might wonder how it could possibly have been made.

What's the difference between an action figure and an action star? Very little in G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which features no performances of note, even from such combat-tested thespians as Bruce Willis, Jonathan Pryce and Dwayne Johnson.

There’s a fundamental problem here. The movie relies on the instinctual human fear of death, but its message is that dying is a promotion.