Michael Wilmington

It's a real shame that most new boxing movies try to copy the crowd-pleasing, sentiment-choked tactics of "Rocky" rather than the stark drama of "Raging Bull" or the realistic grit of "On the Waterfront" and "The Harder They Fall." Against the Ropes is only the latest sorry example. The sad thing is that, with this real-life story and subject, it could have been a contender.

Cheerful but mind-numbing.

I can't think of much that might happen on a date evening that could be more annoying than this movie.

Falls flat on its face.

Technically clever but emotionally bankrupt...it's an almost laughably opportunistic movie.

It may entertain you if you don't mind senseless stories and screaming soundtracks.

Outrageously vapid and overdone movie.

Sluggish and preposterous, full of violence and cliches.

The movie suffers from a devastating flaw for a comedy: It isn't very funny.

What isn't scary--or exciting, amusing or fun--is XXX: State of the Union, a movie so preposterous, cliché-packed and over the top that it makes the original "XXX" seem as good as the original "State of the Union."

An odd little ghoul too cleaned up to survive, a bloodless vampire movie that's mostly lifeless as well.

One more movie comedy about how love can turn you into an idiot. And its major flaw, among many others, is that the idiocy takes over the movie.

The best thing about star and co-writer David Spade's Dickie Roberts, Former Child Star is the end-title sequence, a big, sassy sing-along in which dozens of old TV child stars spew out defiant jokes about their old careers and fame's fickle fingers.

It would be a lie to suggest that there aren't some crudely effective moments in Ghost and the Darkness. After all, this is a movie where two man-eating lions pop up every 10 minutes or so, growl and drag off another fresh corpse or two. But crude effectiveness is all the movie has to offer -- and even that is a mark it doesn't always hit.

It's like a class reunion in purgatory. All the familiar faces are there, but the air is sulfurous and murky, and hell is just an elevator ride away. [10 Dec 1993, p.A2]

Wedding Date is neither good art, good entertainment nor even good trash.

A flashy-looking low-budget indie about drugs, love and crime in small-town Iowa. But, speaking as an ex-small-town Midwesterner, I found it hard to buy.

Jingle All the Way has been well shot and imaginatively designed. But somehow that makes it worse. So does the fact that all the actors, Schwarzenegger included, are skilled enough to make you watch them. [22 Nov 1996, p.C]

Some movies should never have been made, and high on that list is the addled new remake of Rollerball.

A fitfully funny retread of "48 Hours," "Fled" and dozens of others.

A mind-numbing, bloody, ridiculous experience.

It's outrageously stereotypical and weirdly personal, so loonily exaggerated it keeps surprising you.

A comedy murder mystery gone seriously astray, boasts an immensely talented cast .

Just withers compared with many older, better movies about teen alienation and nihilism, from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "River's Edge."

A fast, slick, outlandish fiasco that starts out well and then seems to drop right off a cliff.

An unabashedly bad movie full of cliches, claptrap, fairly good rock 'n' roll and stomach-turning gross-out gags.

Some film premises are so outlandish, so thinly worked out and so deep-down ridiculous that they wind up sinking the show -- and White Chicks collapses under a real doozy.

Sweet-tempered but superficial.

A gaudy yet grim science-fiction horror movie of such surpassing silliness, humorless intensity and stylistic overkill that watching it may actually put you in a state of paranoia.

It's those scenes-and computer graphics ingeniously engineered by Richard Hollander and VIFX-that give "Ghost" what little kick it generates. Its hero and villain may be hackers, but its heart is hack. [30 Dec 1993, p.20]

The crass sentimentality of American Wedding increasingly fits Norman Mailer's definition: "the emotional promiscuity of the basically unemotional." The jokes are unemotional, uncouth and mostly unfunny.

There's no reason to look at this movie unless you're interested in computer graphics. But, if you are, why not wait for the video game? It may not be any better,but at least you can turn it off. [17 Jan 1996, p.7]

The idea may sound like fun, but the movie isn't. It's a travesty of a picture that's a disgrace to the memory of the great film from which it's remade. [5 February 1999, Friday, po.A]

This clunky remake can't rise from the ashes, nor would you want it to.

How is it possible that actors as expert as Close and Depardieu can wind up together in a mostly brainless big-budget stinker?

A good-natured but trivial Manhattan romantic comedy.

One hopes that this is Hollywood's last go-round with Swept Away. Watching this fiasco, I kept having nightmares about a possible cartoon version, co-starring Cruella de Vil and Shrek.

Instead of becoming bewitched, we're caught up in one more gallery of cliches and storytelling blunders. The Glitches of Eastwick. [03 May 1996, p.C2]

The Little Rascals is a nice-looking movie-shot in a nostalgic childhood haze by Richard Bowen-but watching it is almost numbing. It's the kind of empty gaudy show the misfit characters in Spheeris' good comedies might waste their time with.

This movie is glum, murky, dour, takes place mostly in the dark, doesn't make much sense and has a surprise climax so ridiculous you may watch it with perverse, astonished respect - the kind you might grant the Joint Chiefs of Staff if they showed up for a press conference wearing lampshades on their heads and yodeling. [17 Sept 1993, p.F]

Superhero comic book movie with a script so feeble it might have been written with crayons.

In White Noise, Hollywood and Michael Keaton try to make a decent thriller out of ghosts in the machine but come up with lousy reception and static.

An almost terminally sappy youth romance.

In this bizarre tale of man among the apes and a psychiatrist among madmen -- an over-emotional hybrid of "Gorillas in the Mist" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" -- style buries substance.

A bad, bad movie...It's loud and dumb and it wastes a good cast on a ludicrous script.

It's a distraction: a buzz in your head that won't go away. [31 March 1995, p.HI]

A contemporary teen summer romance with a modern sexual twist--though in many ways, it's just the same old malarkey.

Just another self-absorbed teen chronicle, with the added twist of a little time travel and a surprise ending.

It's a murky, empty-headed dive into the depths of the Antarctic and the heart of monster movie cliches that leaves you praying for most of the cast to get killed off fast, to put them (and us) out of our misery.

It's a glossy, well-mounted, slickly done but almost stuporously predictable affair, both formula-bound and utterly illogical.

Though I would agree it's original -- it's the first aboveground romance movie I've seen in which the heroine is repeatedly spanked, verbally tormented and tied to a chair by her lover--- it's not an experience I much enjoyed.

Barker, who wasn't involved with the earlier Candyman, has never yet matched his stunning 1987 writer-director debut Hellraiser-and he never will if he keeps coming up with projects like this. [17 Mar 1995, p.J]

What we get, while rarely boring, is a succession of senseless scenes bathed in formula-thriller blue light, full of blazing Uzis, exploding helicopters and sentimental male bonding.

Nonstrously over-whimsical. It's a gigantic, fatuous whoopie-cushion of a movie-big, smiley and flabbergastingly dumb. Watching it, you may get an odd, overwhelmed feeling, as if you were being smothered to death by party balloons. [15 Oct 1993, p.N]

The new Walt Disney version of "The Three Musketeers"-plushly mounted, but ineptly written and cast-gallops along like a gargantuan tutti-frutti wagon running amok. [12 Nov 1993, p.C]

Fairly well done but deadly dull futuristic thriller.

A grotesque slumgullion of kung fu, studio schlock and pseudo-Dumas swashbuckling that leaves you longing for Doug Fairbanks --or even Don Ameche and The Ritz Brothers.

It's one of those movies where talented filmmakers waste time with stale, phony material.

A flabbergasting waste of time and talent.

Final Destination 3 is a gorefest that should either slake your worst appetites or drive you to the exits.

An oppressively cute Manhattan time-travel romantic comedy that’s lost in time, space and cliches.

Sometimes, you can use a smaller devil to catch the Devil, the movie suggests. But in this case, the entire movie goes to hell in record time.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't laugh at some of this--though it's not as funny as Laurel and Hardy as toddlers in "Brats." But I wanted to slap myself whenever I did.

Despite a big budget, lots of technical flair and a good cast headed by Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames, it's mostly a bloody mess.

There's almost no reason to see the movie, unless you have no qualms about wasting your time.

We're reminded of Police Academy because this is another story about outcasts and rejects banding together to beat the odds in a macho profession. And we're reminded of The Sting because that's how we feel after the movie is over. Stung.

Turturro is the one thing that's right with the movie. Perhaps the weakest thing about the new "Deeds" is its utter lack of a strong viewpoint and real emotion.

The film may be bad-and mad-but it's not predictable.

The Favor is a sex comedy without sex-and pretty much without comedy. [29 Apr 1994]

Often ridiculous, mostly poorly written and, surprisingly poorly acted too. No matter how many flashy scenes the filmmakers shoot, the bad lines just keep dripping down. [21 Aug 1998]

Airborne is a fairly shameless little picture, but at least it follows the First Rule of Cinema. It gives us something interesting to watch: the climactic hill race, with the largely unidentifiable racers zooming and hurdling one another on hairpin hillside curves...Unfortunately, Airborne also follows the First Rule of Bad Movies. Instead of telling a story, the filmmakers follow an outline (or, in this case, an in-line).

It's a movie that puts Samuel Jackson in kilts, Robert Carlyle in a red Jaguar, and the audience -- if they have any sense at all -- out in the lobby, looking for another picture.

Accomplishes something I would have thought impossible. It made me appreciate its 1994 predecessor, "The Flintstones."

The movie has an absurd script, fueled by that current B-movie staple, the idiot plot--a plot that proceeds only because all, or most, of the characters, act like idiots.

This is one more "yuppie-in-peril" movie, just as slick and empty, manipulative and crude, as most of the rest: all those paranoid pictures bent on scaring us with insane roommates, murderous baby-sitters and killer temps. [5 Apr 1993, p.F3]

This dingy, drab, pointless little movie -- a would-be shamrock shocker about four teen-agers menaced by the Irish super-scamp while renovating a North Dakota farmhouse -- is made without flair or imagination, seemingly enervated by its own bad taste and low intentions. [11 Jan 1993, p.F3]

The movie knocks your eyes out, at the same time it dulls the mind’s eye. Ultimately, it’s one more stop in the arcade, beckoning, waiting to soak up time and money.

Whatever magic the first two movies may have had -- and it wasn't always that apparent to anyone over the age of 10 -- has long since congealed, like stale pizza. Or mock turtle soup. [22 Mar 1993, p.F9]

Instead of coming to a high, flavorful boil, the whole thing quickly overcooks and begins evaporating into hot air.

This is the same dopey save-the-princess-and-kill-everybody revenge plot we always get. The Return of Swamp Thing is enough to drive you back to the comic book stand. Or even the swamp.

Admirers of Rambo III will probably point out that it moves fast. But then, so does a gazelle-and a gazelle has better dialogue and more personality. [25 May 1988, p.1]

This cautionary thriller about an unjustly imprisoned airline mechanic has a chance to be a canny blend of gutsy melodrama and J'Accuse against the prison system. But, by the end, it has gone as slick and corrupt as the crafty old con (F. Murray Abraham) who advises Tom Selleck's framed Jimmie Rainwood on jail survival. On a fundamental moral level, An Innocent Man is guilty as hell.

A movie for people with time to waste, Sniper is about as compelling as a Soldier of Fortune magazine cover set to music.

The movie makers try to revive another day’s genre--the early ’70’s “road” pictures--in today’s terms. And it doesn’t work. The looser, more anarchic feelings they’re going after don’t jibe with the modern packaging, and they wind up with something slicked-up, streamlined and hollow--like “Blowing in the Wind” rearranged as elevator music.

It's an ultra-slick, ultra-flat movie that cuts like a cellophane knife. No edge, no blood.

Hardware isn’t long on ideas, emotions or character; it degenerates into a mindless slaughterhouse crescendo.

Thompson has always had an evil sense of humor, and the movie repeatedly crosses the line between dramatizing a situation and exploiting it, exposing racism or moral rot and almost indulging in it. But the disturbance you feel in watching Kinjite doesn’t just come because it has a sordid subject, some bad scenes or a heavy cargo of shock and sleaze, but because it leaves us, much of the time, with no moral anchor.

This is the same infinitely repeated plot of "Halloweens" 1, 2 and 4 (3 took a slightly deviant turn), with the same unkillable bogyman Michael Myers, wreaking the same programmed havoc, and Donald Pleasence as the same distraught psychiatrist, repeating the same dire warnings to no avail.

The first 15 minutes have some funny bits, but the movie winds up sapping you. It's a kind of whoopee-cushion nightmare, as if you woke up one morning and noticed that everyone on the street was drooling on his or her tie.

A movie to make ninnies whinny, audiences gag and horses hide their heads.

Lean, mean, clean and empty-hearted, Fire Birds is a video-game recruiting poster with a bomb ticking inside--a bomb that never goes off.

Big Trouble in Little China is a try at mock-Oriental movie magic that goes leaden about a third of the way through -- and finally detonates into great, whomping firebombs of overcalculated, underinspired absurdity. [02 July 1986, p.10]

This is a two-sentence movie. In cases like this, you're lucky to get three sentences' worth of dramatic development. Like here.

Director H.S. Miller thinks he's made something broodingly visionary when you're more likely to be aesthetically shaken up by one of Mad magazine's Fold-Ins.

Here is a satire about government and business corruption that's as empty, corrupt and manipulative as everything it attacks: a frantic, jokeless comedy about selling out, that sells out itself constantly. This is another big, dumb, pointless picture, a "high concept" movie that's all concept and no movie.

There's nothing dopier than the crooks in one-against-a-hundred action movies -- except maybe the people who cook them up. [12 Feb 1990, p.F8]

The movie is Rambo crossed with Fraternity Vacation and a bad cartoon version of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It's an amazingly senseless movie, done with blood-curdling confidence. Each jaw-dropping howler is staged with such rattling intensity and perfect, seamless idiocy that it becomes weirdly amusing.

If you ignore the script--a good strategy for most recent major studio movies--there’s a lot of talent here. But Cimino’s Hours, instead of getting desperate, gets desperately pretty.