Michael Wilmington

It’s not a bad film. Brightly designed, slickly paced, it has its cargo of youth elements: laughs, sexual tease, action and music. But, halfway through, you can almost feel everyone relaxing, waiting for the next bit of spiritless slapstick or car-chase to carry them through to the end.

Everything about the movie is overscaled, overbrutal, overbroad, full of holes. Yet there's something cheerful and wacky about it; it's a light-hearted blood bath.

The talk and plot twists both have a flavorless, perfunctory quality.

Despite its good performances--Minns, Lumbly, Shelby and Best, as well as Plummer--South Central lacks a certain juice, heat and life. It doesn’t boil with the energy you’d expect from a gang picture, and it doesn’t have the density or rich atmosphere of a Boyz N the Hood, Do the Right Thing or New Jack City.

The movie is like a big, smug, sunny ball of fluff, batting around in a crystalline cage. It's bright and well-meaning, but there's little to grab onto or feel. Not even the presence of those expert actor/farceurs, Steve Martin and Diane Keaton, give it any real presence or bite. [20 Dec 1991, p.16]

The Bedroom Window engrosses you in theory more than practice. As a thriller, it has elements that many recent Hitchcock pastiches have lacked: interesting characters and a somewhat complex plot. But perhaps this story simply looks good by contrast. The movie also lacks sheer juice and voltage. [16 Jan 1987, p.C17]

London's Fang was, fundamentally, a loner and a killer; the movie Fang is a big, friendly dog, temporarily derailed into the fight game by snarling villains. That makes this White Fang, rather oversunny, overaffirmative, primarily a movie for children. But I liked it anyway, despite the softened tone, the coincidences, despite Hawke's constantly gaping mouth.

Witchboard is smarter, and better acted, than much of its bloody competition. But it isn't crazy or original enough to stand too far above them. It's makers and its monsters alike deserve the same salutation: Better luck next time. [16 Mar 1987, p.8]

It's a mixed bag; parts of it are awful. But it has, and needs, only one major defense: It's full of Grade-A rock 'n' roll, rousingly well performed. It moves, it swings, it jumps and vibrates. It's a musical. [05 Nov 1990, p.F10]

The film now seems less urbane and innovative, more coldly flashy and bluntly affected -- full of sound and Furie, signifying little. [2 June 1987, p.Cal-1]

It’s a low-budget production with major-league acting by Mary Steenburgen, Holly Hunter and Alfre Woodard. It’s not directed sharply enough; Thomas Schlamme is particularly weak on the fight scenes.

Light of Day is a sympathetic, intelligent movie, with one great performance, but it suffers from the malaise rock 'n' roll is supposed to cure: inhibitions, a lack of spontaneity. [06 Feb 1987, p.4]

Despite the movie's ruinous cliches, Neeson puts some genuine anguish into his phonily written scenes as the '60s burnout. Bateman plays to him well, and Phillips, making her feature debut, has some funny moments in the flashy kook role.

Chevy Chase has not been on a roll lately, and to say that in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation he's funnier than in his last six movies combined may sound like high praise, until you remember those six movies. "Caddyshack II" alone almost throws them into the "minus" laugh range. But here, he does what he does best: flat-out slapstick and subversive tear-downs of his own smooth image. This sweet, goofball, manic middle-class daddy brings out his sharpest reflexes and he gets good support from D'Angelo, the bulging-eyed slob-in-excelsis Quaid, and from Questel and Hickey as his dottiest relations.

Jennifer 8 is smarter than most of the swanky scare machines, but it’s also too hemmed-in by convention and programmed scares. The game is too rigid: the player’s skills are being wasted. The movie, perhaps, should have been built entirely around those Garcia-Malkovich scenes--because it’s in the exchange of glances between those two, the scraped wariness of Garcia, the quiet, almost lazy sadism of Malkovich, that it really chills the blood.

The boys are breezy; their companions glib and glittery. This big studio mix of bang-bang and badinage isn’t really a bad movie. But a lot of it suggests a fancy misfire: a super-powered evening at the town’s most expensive eatery, where everybody starts out psyched up to have Big Fun, and things start to slide. What happens? The food disappears. The music is too loud. The conversations are brittle, the jokes are pushed too hard, everyone laughs too much. And, at the end, in case your attention starts wandering, people start pulling out guns and killing each other.

Though it doesn't really work, there are enjoyable things about it.

Norman Taurog's The Caddy is a sometimes subpar 1953 Martin & Lewis golfing comedy enlivened by a Dean and Jerry duet on "That's Amore" and a snatch of their great stage act. [22 Jul 1988, p.23]

Midway through The Lost Boys there's a brief scene that suggests the magic and power it could have had. This scene suggests a fable of seductive evil-but nothing in the movie is ever half as evocative again. It's more lost than the Boys: a glossy fiasco with most of the real blood sucked out of it.

It's one of those movies that, however well it works now, might have been pretty bad with a different cast and director. It doesn't really transcend its genre; it just stretches it in amusing and sometimes surprising ways.

As a concert film, judged from the music, Sign O' the Times is near the top. As a movie -- carrying inside it the embryo of other movies -- it's not fully satisfying. But you sense it could be; however he stumbles, Prince gives you the impression he'll always, catlike, leap back. [20 Nov 1987, p.4]

We're No Angels proves that a great ensemble is no guarantee of a great movie -- but it also proves that the misses of the brilliant can still give you something extraordinary. [15 Dec 1989, p.F12]

The best thing about High Heels are the performances - [Victoria Abril]'s tense, voracious daughter, Parades' star-turn mother, the sinister Bose, the arrogant Atkine - and the lucidity of Almodovar's narrative style, which by now seems as natural as breathing. [20 Dec 1991]

There are misfires in Sucka, but there's also some funny stuff. Wayans shows a refreshing taste for self-mockery. [17 Feb 1989, p.8]

The Fourth War doesn't make much sense, but it's powerfully acted and beautifully directed. [23 Mar 1990, p.F4]

Like the movies its modeled after, it's shallow, frequently silly. But there's something about the mix--maybe something about Parillaud as the screechy, dangerous Nikita--that may make the movie a powerful engine of wish-fulfillment. [12 Apr 1991, Calendar, p.F-10]

It’s cute and high-spirited, and it shows some talent and verve. Watching it, you feel that Beaird is capable of something really good; even when his material goes stale and tasteless, there’s a joie de vivre in his direction.

In the end, even in the howling high frequencies and the nihilistic night, this R-rated movie misses its best shot. It doesn't talk hard enough. [22 Aug 1990, p.5]

Decline's redeeming grace is its jocular, damn-the-proprieties air and, for the first half, its staccato editing rhythm. It's damnation is most of the music and its relative avoidance of heavy metal's darker corners: the pith and point that Alex Cox gave punk in Sid and Nancy.

The movie has the same problem as Davis' Chuck Norris vehicle, Code of Silence. Starting in the semi-realistic framework of the '70s cop movies, it veers off into '80s action movie cloud-cuckoo land: the paranoid one-against-a-hundred cliches of the average Schwarzenegger-Stallone heavy-pectoral snow job. [08 Apr 1988, p.14]

Most of the rest of this Hamlet effective or lovely as parts of it may be, just keeps sawing at the air in a drafty hall and pouring all its light on Mel Gibson and his angelic stubble. [18 Jan 1991]

It never cuts loose. No matter how much come-hither villainy Gere generates, or how much envy and menace Garcia throws back at him, they're still trapped there in that bare, empty story, waiting for the dry ice and the steam to arrive.

Brighton Beach Memoirs may be one of Simon’s best plays, but the film’s heart seems to be beating in a plastic wrapper. There’s a kind of glace over everything, a sugary show-biz coat that dulls your taste buds. Everything is bigger, brighter and broader than it should be--though remnants of that simpler, more honest story often peek through.

It’s not the gem it wants to be, but it’s good in comparison to many of the sensation-hungry pictures around it; it’s not just a movie only a mother could love.

When it's just roaring along through a kaleidoscope of Los Angeles locations, the camera perched behind, above or below the skateboarding heroes and villains, the movie can be fun. It's shot in an extravagant, try-anything, music-video style. It's rattlingly paced, vibrant and splashy. Then we get to the story. Stop me if you've heard this one: Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl. Sound familiar? Try this for extra spice. Two warring teen-age gangs clash--the free-and-breezy Valley Guy "Ramp Locals" and the swaggering, black leather, bone-in-the-nose "Daggers."

You’d have to stretch hard to call this movie--a young-love-on-the-run chase thriller with political undercurrents--a success. The story often lacks credibility or a mainspring; its heart sticks too hard to its sleeve. But there are compensating factors: warmth, guts, ambition.

The second film never has the hardness or urgency of the first. Its best moments, perhaps happily, tend to come from the actors rather than the story or Richard Edlund's effects: especially newcomers Geraldine Fitzgerald and Julian Beck. [23 May 1986]

Kill Me Again doesn't look like the noir classics; instead of black-and-white, it's shot in slightly muddy color with vagrant green tints. But it feels like them. It has that nerve-jangling mix of pungent cynicism and thick gobs of pseudo-Expressionist style. It's not brilliant or original, but it's still a lean, fast, wide-awake sleeper.

It's Whoopi Goldberg, however, who gives you something extraordinary. At the center of all this formula tongue-in-cheek thriller pablum, she keeps sending out weird curves and bent splinters of off-center energy. She's a remarkably empathic actress, and you only hope she'll get a few vehicles that push her to the limit.

To give the movie its due, it's been directed, at least on the visual level, with unusual elegance: filled with graceful, gliding tracking shots, and icily precise Hitchcockian setups of the bleak decor and scary effects.

For the right audience, it'll be fun. It's for action movie fans with a taste for something off the beaten track -- but not too far. And for people who like to rail and spew against the vulgarity and stupidity of TV -- but keep watching it all anyway.

No one who sees the last half-hour of this movie will ever forget it--though quite a few may want to.

It wins a few, loses a few. It makes us laugh, gets mileage out of the Four Seasons’ “Walk Like a Man.” In the end, the actors save it, especially two of the actors: star Robert Downey Jr., who may have moved into the Robin Williams-Steve Martin-Whoopi Goldberg category, and supporting actor David Paymer, who never hits a false note.

Poltergeist III is another sequel that seems to exist for no better reason than justifying its title and number.

The phrase "by the numbers" was invented for the way Harper crafts this script. After coming up with a good notion, opening and close, he simply fills up the middle innings with the detritus of several decades of TV sitcoms and high-concept kid movies. [07 Jul 1993, p.F1]

A modernized version of that great sentimental horse movie, 1943's "My Friend Flicka," and it comes with the shiny trappings, high professionalism and glamorous accessories you might expect...Something is missing though.

The two halves of Hiding Out--thriller and teen sex comedy--never meld, working against each other rather than together. Hiding Out never escapes its absurd hook, this mechanical collision of genres. After all, if someone really needs to hide out, isn't the best plan to simply . . . hide out?

A cute, well-acted film that tries to mix tones sharply.

Freaky Friday commits a lot of sins; luckily, it has Curtis and a few others to cover them up.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles never rises above its marketing-hook origins. It's a product, a commodity, a toy tie-in, a trailer for the comics, an advertisement for the cereal. It's a naked sell.

An uninspired misfire of a TV-series knockoff that, despite its great cast and smart filmmakers, never manages to scare up much magic.

A pumped-up, flag-waving, outrageously hokey and ridiculous -- but sometimes incredibly exciting -- war movie.

In movies as in life, superior technology doesn't necessarily trump humor, magic or really shaggy dogs.

The sense of the unknown that "Padgett" created are largely absent. And the movie fails to supply us with an antagonist to work up some dramatic conflict. Nor are the toys themselves very interesting and Mimzy is a toy bunny of no distinction.

Less a movie than a loud, heavy, money machine, a think tank where nobody thinks. The movie seems intended to extract maximum profit with minimum artistry -- and if you like having your pockets picked by experts, this is probably the show to see. [15 Mar 1996, p.C]

Has heart, but lacks bite.

The film tries to mix the two 1930s movie comedy strains: screwball romance and populist fable. But there's something nerveless and thin about it. Hawn and Russell are good, but their scenes together have a calculated spontaneity--overcute, obvious. Director Garry Marshall keeps the lines slamming off each other briskly but with a shallow, hectoring energy. And he doesn't have much visual flair.

This film has so many good ideas, it tends to seem better after you've left the theater. But the mock TV stuff is just too faux to be funny.

A big, hearty fantasy-adventure with spectacular fire-breathing effects and a fizzling story. [31 May 1996, p.C]

By creating a kind of politically correct version of Andy Griffith's "Mayberry," director Bezucha has drained the movie not only of bigotry but also of dramatic conflict.

The trajectory of the film -- despite its excellent cast and intelligent mounting -- is too preordained.

A wildly expensive movie full of computers, nonsense and violence, a film where wit, romance, elegance -- everything -- is sacrificed on the altar of giganticism, cliche and over-the-top action.

Boyle's new movie is mostly a zombie fiasco, closer to the vacuities of "The Beach" than the scintillating social satire of "Trainspotting."

Keith -- a consistent hit-maker who wrote the controversial 9/11 song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" -- has a future in movies if he wants it. Hopefully, they'll be better ones than this.

What the movie doesn't have, besides too many laughs, is either the pungent style and sociology of true film noir, or the sheer yuppie desperation of the hard-core erotic thriller. Instead of being hard-boiled, it's over easy.

A breakthrough for karate comedy king Chan, but not necessarily the kind we've all been waiting and hoping for. It's an ultra-digitized DreamWorks show crammed with elaborate special effects, the kind that physical-stunt specialist Chan has always avoided.

A likable little movie without much to offer but cute tots, recycled gags and a talented cast amiably wasting their time and ours.

The movie is like the bikers; it's best and freest when it's just racing ahead. Whenever it stops, you ask too many questions.

A bizarre, bloody adventure movie.

Pink Cadillac has a strong visual design and lots of juicy, self-confident acting. But it doesn’t transcend its star vehicle trappings or chemistry. The construction of the story is so soft, you get the impression that if the driver and navigator were replaced, the movie might turn rattletrap and fall apart.

In Nightbreed neither the coyly horrible killers nor the horribly coy monsters register strongly enough. It's a dark beast with a flabby hide.

This rich, gorgeous music and the wistful pastoral scenes create a rhapsodic mood that the rest of the film doesn't really sustain.

A feast of bad taste, a demonic hog-wallow.

A business-as-usual blockbuster blueprint that rarely surprises you.

This is a picture in which the barf scenes standard in the usual crude youth comedies aren't gratuitous. They're logical climaxes.

Parents is all leftovers, despite the tasty little tidbits that Quaid and Hurt keep sporadically cooking up: Dad's spotless collars and loopy grin, Mom's brittle Cutex-lacquered claws. [27 Jan 1989, p.7]

The movie doesn't deserve any of the talent bestowed on it, from Reiner's amiable direction to the occasional grace notes in the performances of Hudson, Marceau and David Paymer.

It's a movie that robs the story of its politics and point and never really matches the charm of the '60s film.

Hobbled with pedestrian direction, a dull visual style and a last act awash in obvious bang-bang melodrama.

This seems to be a movie made by people who love the old classic movie swashbucklers but don't have a clue how to make or modernize them.

Unfortunately, the humans only have scripts to support them. So for every bear triumph, Country Bears also features cliched jokes, corny sentiment, ludicrous shtick and the most flabbergasting set of star cameos since Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson wandered into "Men in Black II."

Most of the jokes in Eddie Murphy Raw are the kind you regale buddies with to show off. Anyone as good as Eddie Murphy should have outgrown that years ago.

Slick but forgettable. [01 Oct 1993, p.C]

Like too many movies these days, takes a clever little idea and all but pounds it into the ground.

An overblown, overspectacular, oversold movie without an original idea in its head.

Despite some impressive technical achievements, it too looks like a movie with little reason for being.

It's a bizarre but engaging fling.

It's a comedy about maniacs: a tasteful murder-comedy, which isn't that laudable a goal.

Slick, expensive and filled with good-looking actors flexing muscles, but once it grabs our attention it doesn't really reward it...this movie doesn't have fear -- or sheer wonder and marvel -- enough.

There's barely a scene in this movie that taps his (Murphy) special brilliance.

Overbroad, underdone.

It’s a big, frothy, high-tech, cutesy-poo musical comedy.

One of those movies that promises much but doesn't deliver. Despite a lot of misplaced talent, this movie is as silly and forced as its title.

Maybe Georgia Rule should be required viewing for Paris Hilton during her term in the slammer. But not for us.

This movie can spot the handsome face that lies beneath an ugly exterior, but it seems to get fooled by the rot that sometimes lurks beneath the sweet and the safe, the formula and the sure-fire.

It's really a crock: a coming-of-age boys' prison film that has only a fanciful link with Behan's life. The film is a bastard grandchild of Tony Richardson's 1962 "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner."

It's a middling film that wastes a lot of good opportunities, as well as two fine, charming co-stars.

Hitchcock adapts another Daphne Du Maurier novel -- a tale of pirates and distressed damsels on the Cornish coast -- with less memorable results than either "Rebecca" or "The Birds." But Charles Laughton is a nicely nasty two-faced villain and Maureen O'Hara a staunch heroine. [18 Jun 2000, p.22]