Peter Bradshaw

It is bafflingly complacent in its sentimentality and its sheer, fatuous implausibility, which makes it valueless and meaningless as drama and comedy.

This cynically Christmassy movie is leaden, unconvincingly acted and about as welcome as a dead rat in the eggnog.

There is no drama or jeopardy or human interest anywhere. This franchise now looks about as urgently contemporary as an in-car CD player.

Cine-narcissism like this is always tiresome, and it isn’t any more palatable in a European setting.

It is burdened by a trite and naive sentimentality that it doesn’t know how to make realistically plausible or transform into romanticism or idealism.

The madly, bafflingly overwrought and humourless storytelling can’t overcome the fact that everything here is frankly unpersuasive and tedious. Every line, every scene, has the emoting dial turned up to 11 and yet feels redundant.

This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.

There’s an odd, disconcerting tone of solemnity to this slice of cultural history.

It all could have been fun with a teaspoonful of humour, but everyone concerned behind the camera has calculated (perhaps correctly) that this would be inimical to its commercial success.

There’s nothing wrong with a big-hearted film for Christmas, but this commercial and formulaic slice of content is a toy destined to be forgotten.

The ploddingly unvaried pace and undirected, underpowered performances make this an exasperating experience: a directionless, shallow movie which seems bafflingly unconvincing and inauthentic at every turn.

Calamy gives it everything she’s got but this film is fundamentally heavy-handed.

Once you get to the big reveal, you feel like you’ve sat through a hundred episodes of a saucy daytime soap with the saucy bits cut out. They could franchise out a sequel: Strictly Confidential in Dubai.

This unbearably cute joint selfie of a movie is gruesomely indulgent and entitled from the first; it allows Ewan McGregor little or no opportunity to show his natural wit and flair and there is oddly no real chemistry between him and his co-star.

This could theoretically be a fun movie, but it is all so self-conscious and self-admiring, with key action sequences rendered null and void by being played on two levels, the imaginary and the real, so cancelling each other out.

The Aquaman franchise is just flatlining, floating through the dreary depths like the kind of discarded plastic bag which is going to choke the last remaining vaquita porpoise.

It’s as if everyone involved is terrified of actually making people laugh in case that gives offence somehow, or disrupts the algorithmic calculation that theoretically makes this a palatable piece of content. The whole thing is as bland as cellophane.

This movie finally ties itself into various knots to prefigure the later world of Katniss, but the time to end the Games came long ago.

This is just a dull and badly acted movie.

One for Hardwicke, and everyone else, to forget.

The first Extraction was entertaining enough but this new one is just cynically about extracting the cash.

Everything about it is heavy-handed and dull: the non-comedy, the ersatz-pathos, the anti-drama.

It’s a script which shows every sign of having had plenty of rewrites, though perhaps it could have done with a few more.

Braff puts us through a gruelling “relapse” montage as Allison hits the pills again after an illusory breakthrough and then a “recovery” montage as she gets it together. And the film’s single valuable lesson – the one about not looking at your phone while driving – is all but forgotten.

The awful truth is that this is a generic derivative horror script.

It’s pretty much a laugh-free film to make you appreciate the work of Nancy Meyers or Richard Curtis; their films may look easy or corny but they have something this doesn’t, a kind of buoyancy or a way of alchemising all the luxury tourist incidentals into something entertaining.

Here is a terribly meagre experience from writer-director Rodrigo García, a silly, pointless movie which never delivers on its promises of drama and comedy and contains not a single funny or believable moment. As a filmic meal, it is pretty much entirely without nutritional or calorific value.

It can’t end well. In fact, it ends badly. In every sense. The mystery of Myers has long since become deflated and inert, and when he is unmasked, the camera can’t quite be bothered to show us his pointless old face (unlike the unhelmeting of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, which did at least show us what the great villain looked like). The only thing that’s scary is the thought of how long this has all been going on.