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."