Nathan Rabin

Dead Man Down exerts an unconscionable level of effort for minimal reward: It aspires to exquisite world-weariness, but just ends up feeling exhausted by its frenzied yet fruitless exertions.

This glossy musical, from "Hairspray" director Adam Shankman, is a shameless crowd-pleaser where cardboard characters use the most overplayed and ubiquitous hits of the 1980s to express the aching banality of their souls.

David Dobkin's film has the faults of raucous recent scatological comedies like "Bad Teacher," "Horrible Bosses," and "The Hangover Part II" with none of their redeeming facets. It's scattershot, sexist, and vulgar without being funny.

With its wall-to-wall pop covers, Chipwrecked isn't a kids' movie so much as a brightly animated, instantly forgettable animated feature-length advertisement for the NOW That's What I Call Music! compilation series of contemporary pop hits.

This sluggishly paced quirkfest is awfully sophomoric for a film all about giving up the facile thrills of youth for the responsibilities of adulthood.

This clumsy action movie feels too generic to be real. The film attempts to add an element of sophisticated sociopolitical commentary to the typical Jason Statham head-busting shoot-'em-up, but only ends up draining it of visceral thrills.

Simultaneously swooningly romantic and transcendently idiotic.

A PG-13 celebration of hot chicks, fast cars, and deplorable behavior is like diet Mountain Dew, near-beer, or an expletive-free version of Straight Outta Compton--a tame, watered-down version of the real thing.

This adventure strands Johnson's famously animated features in eyebrow jail, and squanders his outsized charisma and gift for winking self-deprecation in a thankless worried-stepfather role. It doesn't call for much, beyond a lot of muscles and an ever-present look of concern for his whiny stepson.

Shyamalan still has an abundance of personality and ambition, and there are scattered moments of craft throughout, but the gulf between his lofty aspirations and feeble accomplishments has seldom been wider or more chuckle-inducing.

It's a film of shuddering earnestness and fevered good intentions gone awry, a dreary slog of a message movie with little but noble if unfulfilled aspirations to commend it.

It isn’t until Temptation grows flamboyantly bad in its final act that it rises to the level of good dumb fun in the trashy tradition of Perry’s most entertainingly awful films.

The charismatic Idris Elba debuts in a key role as an alcoholic priest who recruits Cage's unique services. Yet instead of elevating the franchise, Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance ends up squandering even more potential.

Everything is pitched to jarring emotional extremes of good and evil, joy and pain, chitlin'-circuit broad comedy, and melodramatic speeches.

It's simultaneously intriguing and repulsive, a would-be cult curio not even the most indulgent cult could love.

Here Comes The Boom seems to have made it from the pitch stage - Kevin James does MMA to save his school or something! - to the big screen without an iota of inspiration, ambition, or personality seeping in at any juncture.

Like The Star Wars Christmas Special, Sgt. Pepper puts a beloved, ubiquitous cultural institution in a new context so staggeringly, mind-bogglingly inappropriate that it engenders an intense, almost unbearable level of cognitive dissonance.

Gangster Squad aims for the pop-operatic intensity of "The Untouchables," but ends up feeling like a savage, simple-minded comic strip.

West is heavy on Vaughn, at least initially, but woefully short on comedy.

In a squandered lead performance, the adorable, winning Schwartzman plays the non-adorable, non-winning title character.

If the sluggishly paced, virtually laugh-free Haunted House is Wayans' conception of a passion-fueled labor of love, it's horrifying to ponder what he'd consider a mercenary cash-grab.

Rock acquits himself nicely as the responsible brother and resident straight man, but everyone else in the cast has apparently been advised to mug shamelessly and yell their lines as loudly as possible.

Pearce is usually dependable, but here, he's utterly unconvincing as a slick phony, and the film peddles a bogus bill of goods in kind.

A painfully earnest drama about post-traumatic stress disorder that sticks so closely to the soldiers-coming-home template, writer-director Ryan Piers Williams seems to be diligently working through a checklist of returning-warrior-movie clichés.

Courageous literally preaches to the converted, delivering ham-fisted messages of responsibility to the most receptive audience possible.

Films like these have taught us that suffering is the incontrovertible existential fate of attractive Los Angeles residents. Must these dour exercises in alienation make audiences suffer as well?

It's safe to say to no idea was nixed on the set of New Year's Eve for being too cheesy or sentimental; if anything, ideas were nixed for not being sentimental or cheesy enough.

With its shameless melodrama, ghoulish violence, and scenes of Christians being slaughtered en masse in holy places for the crime of publicly being Christians, the religious drama For Greater Glory feels an awful lot like evangelical Tribulation dramas such as "Left Behind: The Movie" and "The Omega Code."

The Spy Kids series once seemed charmingly homemade. These days, it feels less charmingly homemade than maddeningly amateurish.

Out-and-out dud, underlining how far the mighty have fallen.

Bettany's performance consists entirely of a purposeful frown paired with a menacing glare: He goes about his godly business with solemn, no-frills intensity. The film follows suit.

Myers combines his love of references, silly names, and mindless repetition by having his guru use "Mariska Hargitay" as a greeting/mantra. The first time it's employed, it's merely unfunny; by the 13th or 40th time, it's almost hypnotic in its awfulness.

Throw out the presence of Dennis Quaid, and the new science-fiction/horror snoozer Pandorum could easily pass for a Roger Corman cheapie.

Grandma's Boy aspires to nothing more than the frathouse goofiness and juvenile high spirits of early Sandler vehicles, but it possesses the energy of a funeral dirge played at half-speed.

It's the ultimate pop-culture sacrilege: a movie about soul music that has no soul.

Browns is ultimately a victim of its creator's success: What once felt novel now feels well-worn, following the success of Perry's films and imitators like "First Sunday."

Jack Frost's juxtaposition of the absurd and the absurdly predictable results in a film that's frequently entertaining, but for the wrong reasons.

Rugrats Go Wild! represents one giant leap forward for corporate cartoon synergy, but one similarly large step back for the Rugrats franchise.

It lacks the conviction to embrace its own garish awfulness, resulting in little more than tedious historical and patriotic hokum, a preposterous potboiler done in by slack pacing and pedestrian execution.

The bigness of Mann’s performance can’t help but set the film’s tone, which goes manic and high-strung to the point of hysteria before settling down and becoming really stupid and gross.

Could and should have been a giddy, tongue-in-cheek action-comedy romp. Instead, it's a meandering action-drama, in which nearly all of the abundant laughs are unintentional.

Charlie Countryman feels like the cinematic equivalent of a dodgy first novel, the kind authors write when they’re young and full of romance, hubris, and pretension—then look back on later in life with something approaching mortification.

A pathetic wallow, first in misanthropy and later in sentimentality.

The main problem, however, is Tamra Davis' leaden direction, which prevents Half-Baked from developing comic momentum. There are a few scattered laughs.

Revealing hitherto unseen depths of stiffness, Diesel stumbles badly in the role.

Adding an additional layer of cheese to a project that already reeks hopelessly of Velveeta, Schumacher pumps up the empty spectacle, stranding his fetching-but-lifeless mannequins amid giant sets and overblown production numbers.

A joylessly plodding film that cannibalizes Allen's classics of the '70s and '80s while managing only a few decent one-liners.

Ribald yet frantically unfunny, it wears out its welcome within the first five minutes, and never comes close to gaining it back. It feels like an alternately flat and flailing television pilot for a bro-comedy no one in their right mind would ever pick up.

A frenetic, busy, expensive machine that looks good but runs on autopilot.

The film's sole redeeming facet is Mike Myers' rich, multilayered performance as Rubell: Simultaneously repulsive and charming, hedonistic and oddly paternal, Myers steals every scene he's in. It's a great performance that deserves to be in a much better film.

The film crawls to a halt, its pace further marred by anemic, time-wasting pop songs. Even at 72 minutes, Never Land feels padded, while the animators make Never Land so unmagical that war-torn London seems preferable by comparison.

Jingle All The Way is one of the most mindlessly flailing films I’ve ever seen.

Darts around maniacally before congealing around a touchy-feely message of personal empowerment whose secular humanism and moral relativism is bound to strike fundamentalists of all stripes as downright Satanic.

Malibu's screenplay inexplicably required the creative efforts of four screenwriters (including Kennedy), which works out to about half a funny gag apiece.

Dolphin Tale 2 makes audiences wade through endless oceans of tedium for those scattered, fleeting moments of grace.

Buddy comedies rely heavily on their leads' chemistry, and in this regard, Without A Paddle fails.

Only succeeds sporadically, even if it's never quite the unwatchable monstrosity it so clearly could have been.

The energetic musical sequences help make it feel warmer and more ingratiating than it otherwise would, which is fortunate, since this rickety vehicle needs all the help it can get.

The popularity of Davis' strip represents the ultimate triumph of mediocrity, but even the cartoonist's competent hackwork deserves better than this.

The acidic Shakespearean family drama The Sea can't be faulted for lack of ambition. It can, however, be faulted for a fatal lack of heart.

An unabashedly pop confection, but it's flat where it should fizz, lumbering when it should skip.

A film this slipshod needs much more star-power than it's able to muster.

Hackman makes a plausible ex-president, but his graceful, lived-in performance is just about the only element of Welcome To Mooseport that rings true.

A well-intentioned but ultimately incompetent Irish dud.

As Above/So Below purposefully generates a certain air of mystery by keeping the exact nature of its protagonists’ experience enigmatic, but for a film that takes place underground in tightly enclosed spaces, it’s surprisingly thin on suspense and palpable physical danger.

A second-rate comedy and a third-rate drama, Melinda And Melinda gives viewers two unsatisfying movies in one. The only genuine tragedy here involves a once-brilliant comedy writer plunging further into a seemingly permanent artistic freefall.

Sadly, the film's creaky, sometimes painful dialogue makes it all too easy to believe that it was genuinely co-written by a small child.

The vapid teen talent show Undiscovered turns on a plot point so moronic that even the most dedicated bad-movie buffs have cause to stay away.

It’s many different films at once—all muddled, all unsatisfying, and all crying out for Liam Neeson’s participation.

A dark comedy about speed freaks that feels like it was directed and edited by someone in the midst of a methamphetamine jag.

Devotes its first two acts to establishing the comic monstrousness of all its characters.

A witless, bloody, unpleasant mismatched-buddy movie.

Like far too many junky post-"Sixth Sense" thrillers, Hide And Seek essentially exists for the sake of its third-act plot twist, but the climactic revelation merely pushes it from bad to worse.

In a self-conscious moment late in the action, one character says she feels like she's in a bad horror movie. No kidding.

Originally titled Lady Killers, this rancid, underlit B-movie aspires to little more than cheap laughs eked out of the discomfort and queasiness Owen and Friedle feel over sexually servicing assertive, kinky old women.

A Yuletide comedy so slight, it sometimes feels like a bonus-sized Christmas episode for a sitcom that never should have been green-lit in the first place.

The Signal would desperately like to be a film of ideas, but the few it presents are vapid and secondhand. Eubank’s overachieving work on the film suggests he’s destined for bigger and better things, though given the airy nothingness of the film’s mind games, that’s setting the bar awfully low.

Empire devolves into a bloody revenge thriller with an ending as primitive as its opening is convoluted.

Dreary, joyless.

As a film, it’s sappy, preachy, and sleepily paced, but it also makes walking in faith seem about as flavorful and appealing as a lettuce sandwich on white bread, slathered in mayo.

Think Like A Man Too isn’t a movie, or even an arbitrary sequel to an arbitrary adaptation of a novelty book, so much as an extended victory lap from filmmakers and actors convinced that all they have to do is show up to equal or top the first film’s success. The sad thing is that they’re probably right.

The deathly silence doomed to haunt theaters during Get Hard allows audiences far too much time to think about its problematic attitudes toward race, gender, sexuality, and class, as well as its borderline-nonsensical plot.

Frankie & Alice gives her the rare opportunity to play a film’s hero and its villain inside the same body, and she does a memorably dreadful job in both capacities. That trainwreck fascination is about the only redeeming facet of a prestige picture gone terribly, though not entertainingly, awry.

As written and directed by newcomer Troy Duffy, The Boondock Saints is all style and no substance, a film so gleeful in its endorsement of vigilante justice that it almost veers (or ascends) into self-parody.

Unrelentingly dreary, and seemingly destined to be remembered, if at all, as that movie Christian Bale lost a full third of his body weight for. It doesn't deserve any better.

The film's only real bright spot is Seth Green, who, as Culkin's sidekick, brings Party Monster a droll wit it otherwise lacks. It's such a dreary mess that when Culkin insists that life in prison isn't too different from being a club kid, it's all too easy to believe him.

Unsurprisingly, the unimaginatively filmed but high-intensity gospel performances prove a highlight, radiating an energy and urgency that the film's stilted dialogue, awkward romance, and clunky plotting can only aspire to.

Quirky, unsatisfying portrait.

Director Sam Weisman's pushy, subtlety-free direction certainly doesn't help. Martin is still capable of making a decent film, but The Out-Of-Towners isn't it.

A repellent orgy of gratuitous violence and hackneyed melodrama, Deuces Wild marks a grim nadir for everyone involved, including late cinematographer John A. Alonzo (Chinatown, Harold & Maude), who deserved a much better swan song.

Though it never really taps into the whole JFK-as-alien-sex-fiend plot as a source of satire, Species 2 is still the superior piece of trash its predecessor should have been.

Too grim and humorless to even qualify as trashy fun.

The film aspires to educate as well as entertain, rattling off the names and relevant distinctions of various dinosaurs as they appear onscreen for the first time. But the overwhelming impression the film leaves is that dinosaur poop was enormous.

Feels stitched together from bits and pieces of lame '80s buddy-cop movies.

Though steeped in both subgenres, Never Die Alone subverts that vicarious enjoyment by showing violence and abuse so unrelentingly ugly that only a sadist could derive the least bit of pleasure from it.

Likely to appeal only to undiscriminating nudity-- and gore -- starved adolescents.

Not since "Battlefield Earth" pitted overacting, nine-foot-tall Psychlos against puny man-animals has there been an interspecies match-up this perversely uninteresting.

What's perhaps most surprising about European Gigolo is its reactionary streak, exemplified by knee-jerk attacks on Europe's equally knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Then again, that seems fitting. The sequel functions as the ultimate Ugly American, good for a few cheap, vulgar laughs and nothing else.