Michael Wilmington

Never really feels right.

A daring, entertaining, but somewhat disappointing affair, something of an overreacher despite Lee's usual pyrotechnics and a brilliant cast.

A collection of flat gags, spiritless action, cornball satire and overbroad or bored-looking performances, it sometimes resembles the draggle-end of a nightmare “Saturday Night Live” show, where the cast has come to despise their own skits.

There's nothing classic about Surviving Eden, even if it is better than reality TV.

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

The first half hour of Hot Chick, before the switch, plays like soft-core porno from the '60s. The rest plays like a bad "Saturday Night Live" sketch stretched to the breaking point.

There's something light and insubstantial about this movie. It almost floats away as you watch it.

Tries to blend old film noir and new high-tech thriller styles with only sporadic impact.

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

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]

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.

A bizarre, bloody adventure movie.

A movie of good intentions and awful results.

A delicately crafted, gently inflected, lovely little movie about the need for love, directed and co-written by Singapore's Eric Khoo ("Mee Pok Man").

Romance and comedy are dumped in favor of carnage: a self-sabotaging decision for what might have been a cute, enjoyable movie.

The role sounds like a sentimental trap, but Penn doesn't fall into it. It's a sensational performance, and he illumines a movie that sometimes seems in danger of descending into modish Hollywood political correctness.

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 movie contains its moments, charms and felicities-even its sharp stings of pleasure and pain. [20 May 1994]

It's a gross parody of its original. And since the original was a gross parody to begin with, the whole thing begins to seem gaseous, overbright, hideously inflated, as if all the bodily function jokes were about to belch it right off the screen.

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).

Simply calling Surf Nazis Must Die a bad movie doesn't do it justice. This is a horror-action movie with dull action and horror, feebly done on every level: leaden satire, a repulsive romance, a revenge saga of zero intensity. The actors are often upstaged by the beach graffiti.

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

Mind-numbing sequel to "Pokemon the First Movie."

Happily was begun as an old-fashioned 2-D "flat" cartoon and then switched by producer John Williams (of "Shrek") and director Paul J. Bolger to 3-D during production. The style finally is an uncomfortable amalgam of both.

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

Won't make your day, but it won't kill it either.

A real sentimental journey -- and luckily they've got both the right director (Darabont) and the right actor to squeeze our heartstrings.

Sometimes funny, often strained comedy.

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.

Weird to the max, smart, sneaky as a Wall Street pickpocket and revved up with cruel wit and brazen imagination, Being John Malkovich is a dark movie comedy that you couldn't forget if you tried.

With his brazen gifts for mimicry, Eddie Murphy may now be the Peter Sellers of blockbuster toilet comedy movies.

Mancini's script, here as before, never rises above simple sadistic button-pushing. [30 Aug 1991, p.F13]

They've jacked this loud, lame shrieker of a movie up to the highest decibels, both aural and visual, and rammed it in our faces with almost numbing aplomb.

The jokes grate on you, the buoyancy seems feigned and none of the nonsense is lyrical. The talent involved seems misused. This film is conceived as a vehicle for Madonna and, even as such, it's a rattling failure. The movie diminishes her, the worst thing a vehicle can do. [10 Aug 1987, p.1]

A neo-noir movie nightmare gone sadly wrong.

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.

A cranky failure with brilliant moments.

It's very smart, very sleek and one of the great Hollywood romantic comedies. [04 Jul 2003, p.C2]

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

It’s an amazingly bald-faced copy of E. T. even though this is E. T. in a sticky wrapper, left under the heater two hours too long.

It's crazy, dangerous and sometimes gorgeous: a feast of nuttiness that takes you, for a while, over the edge.

Phantoms may have sold like hotcakes as a book. But this movie version is a grotesque fiasco, a confoundingly senseless story told with unexciting visuals, cliched dialogue and ear-bashing sounds... Watching it is a truly hellish experience. [23 Jan 1998]

An almost terminally sappy youth romance.

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

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

Drop Dead Fred is an erratic stab at making madness sensible, a slapstick nightmare that goes too sane, that tries too hard to be both good and rotten.

All too obvious, all too easy, the sort of tongue-in-chic L.A. comedy that mistakes glibness for high style, heartfelt pop choruses for wisdom.

A sappy, often absurd disappointment, another would-be inspirational romance that, like Costner's overwrought "Message in a Bottle," is impossible to swallow.

One of those movies that starts like a house afire, catches you firmly in its narrative grip and then suddenly blows itself out, not really going out with a whimper but with a big, bad, ludicrous bang.

You have to have faith that kids will recognize a bad movie when it's foisted on them -- and they don't get much worse than The New Guy.

Sequels to big-budget popular hits usually end up super-slick, shallow and inflated. But this one isn't even super-slick; it's shallow and deflated...The overall effect is of a story atomized and dying before our eyes, collapsing into smashed pulp, ground down into big-budget Kryptonite ash. [27 July 1987, p.1]

Hool directs all this so lethargically you might suspect he’s gone missing in action himself.

A big, empty picture full of star turns, artificial energy and jokes that don't quite work, even if stars Willis and Perry do their best to slam them across.

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

It lives on its action and dies on its gab. It also would have been better without all those songs about catching the thunder and grabbing the lightning and going for the glory. They sound like a rejected ad campaign for Old Milwaukee. In movies like this, action is often enough--but here, it's just not radical.

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.

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

It’s one of those movies that seem fabricated for a shopping mall: decorative, pretty, vacuous.

The Wizard is bright, fast and energetic, but there’s not much real life to it. It’s another movie that’s disappeared into its own marketing hook: Three kids on the road, living and loving, racing toward personal redemption and video ascension.

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.

A real stinker. It doesn't have the courage of its own bad taste, or that of its villain.

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.

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

Sluggish and preposterous, full of violence and cliches.

It's the material that's a problem, its sheer emptiness. Gottlieb and co-writer Ed Rugoff are clumsily trying to re-create something that's better if it's done cannily, with no illusions.

A mind-numbing, bloody, ridiculous experience.

They’ve made a sometimes funny, mostly media-referential movie without much real life; a high-tech, high-pro job that has a glamor-robot feel.

Some movies are a joy. Some are a chore. And some are sheer torture. A good example of the latter is Virus. [17 January 1999, Metro Chicago, p.8]

This movie makes sexual adventurism seems so ludicrous, that it might have been made by Puritans in disguise, trying to portray hedonists as a pack of fatheads.

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.

The political movie satire from hell.

Despite the final escape of star Steve Guttenberg, and the loss, long since, of the original director and writers, this is almost a good movie. It's an incremental, heavily qualified success, but "PA 5" is an improvement on the elephantine, witless "2," "3" and "4."

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.

Blue City has exactly one thing to recommend it: Ry Cooder’s typically funky, steely, hard-edged score. Overall, it’s such a flabbergasting turkey--misfiring in every conceivable direction--that it may actually improve if you watch it with your eyes shut.

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.

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]

On the movie's feeble plus side are Richard Gant's acting (as the coroner), Manfredini's music and one funny joke in the last half-minute. On the minus side: ludicrous characters. Garbled nonstop gore. Persistent loud, clanging noises that give you the impression of being trapped inside a malfunctioning radiator. Shadowy lighting that makes you feel as if you're staggering around in the dark. [16 Aug 1993, p.F3]

The movie is full of phallic gags about little-bitty guns and crude jokes at physical or emotional infirmities. [17 Nov 1989, p.6]

This is a movie that boggles the mind: a bad-taste comedy that makes the average effort by the Farrelly Brothers (mysteriously thanked in the credits) look like a Merchant-Ivory film.

But beware: "Hamburger" is the dregs of "Animal House" and "Police Academy" raked over again, with another passel of daffy, goofy, sex-crazed guys; bosomy, moaning sex-starved girls; screaming nerds; yowling dimwits and howling bullies... The script may set a record for misfiring gags and lewd puns. [3 Feb 1986, p.C7]

It's hard to create snap-crackling languor or laid-back frenzy. And there's also something condescending in the entire conception of Mixed Nuts. [21 Dec 1994, p.7]

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

A smorgasbord of bad ideas, sumptuously over-realized.

Johnny Be Good, a would-be satire on the excesses of big-time college football recruiting, is so bad that the NCAA might consider using it as punishment for coaches who violate regulations.

Scientology or not, the movie is a battlefield bummer that makes you want to revolt.

That this bit of pustulence is based on a video game of the same name is no surprise. It explains the thin plot, characters and abundant gunplay.

Teen Wolf Too embellishes its inane, cookie-cutter plot with remote direction, witless dialogue and charmless characters.

This movie is soooo bad (How bad is it?) that it makes "Caddyshack I" look like "Godfather II."

A loathsome shocker... Watching it almost turned my stomach.

Though the movie is pretty stereotypical and sometimes crude, it also has a sweet laid-back temper. It has amusing moments.

At first, Something Special looks like it's going to be an appalling little stinker, one of those tasteless travesties whose manufacture and release makes you wonder at the sanity of the movie industry. Then, unexpectedly, you begin to get caught up in the rhythms, characters and storytelling.