Peter Travers

I laughed, then I wished it was funnier, then I just wished it would end.

It's the Bay touch you feel in the way actors register as body count, characters go undeveloped, and sensation trumps feeling. A nightmare, indeed.

Here's a true S&M date movie. Only sadistic men and masochistic women could love it.

The infuriating cop–out ending reduces the premise to mush. I wanted to scream. Here goes: Arghh!

The bad news isn’t that Carrey and Daniels got old, it's that the jokes did. The spirit is still willing in Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the original writer-directors, but the sagging flesh is weak from prolonged repetition.

So why oh why is The Expendables such a limp-dick bust? Because Stallone forgets to include non-spazzy direction, a coherent plot, dialogue that actors can speak without cringing, stunts that don't fizzle, blood that isn't digital and an animating spirit that might convince us to give a damn.

Even the best actors – and this coming-of-age movie boasts a handful of them – can't fight this much tin-eared dialogue.

Morning sickness afflicts most of the potential mommies. For me, the movie itself triggered the vomiting.

This lumbering retread, subtitled The Legend of Curly's Gold, is mostly old ground slavishly covered. There are wider gaps between the jokes this time, and the slick style of British director Paul Weiland, best known for commercials (Schweppes, Heineken), can't disguise the fact that he's selling stale goods.

This comedy about a death is a funeral for the audience.

I'm convinced there is a good movie trying to punch itself out of The Greatest Showman. What a shame that Gracey buried Jackman and company in a pile of marshmallow.

Me, I just think it blows. What does it matter if you spend millions on a movie - love the talking, battling bears! - if the effects are cheesy, the story runs off on tangents and after watching the movie fail utterly to be the next Lord of the Rings, you just want to go home.

Will Ferrell and Danny McBride can find the dumb fun in anything. Too bad that Land of the Lost is so much less than anything.

The Americanized version is miscast, misguided and misbegotten.

Blomkamp and his wife and co-writer, Terri Tatchell, stack the deck. Instead of awe, we get "E.T." - aww.

If you laughed at Tim Story's first "Think," based on Steve Harvey's bestselling advice book for women, you'll probably ride along for this jacked-up, Vegas-set sequel in which dudes and dolls offer sexist approaches to throwing a bachelor party.

Overthought, overwrought and thuddingly underwhelming, this high-profile misfire makes a congealed gumbo out of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer-winning 1946 novel and the Oscar-winning 1949 movie that followed it, sinking a classy cast in the goo.

Even director Carl Franklin, an artful purveyor of sterner stuff in "One False Move" and "Devil in a Blue Dress," can't prevent One True Thing from descending into chick-movie hell.

There's nothing to distract you from a plot so tired there are tire tracks from other racing movies all over it.

I left this movie feeling I’d been had. And not in a good way.

Veering between sentimentality and exploitation with a few misguided stops at raunchy sex farce, Reign Over Me never finds a tone to suit its purpose.

How did talent like this conspire to pump out such bilge? I mean, really.

It's not so bad that it's good. It's so bland that it's boring. Not even worth a hissss.

A manipulative script about dog reincarnation that whacks your emotions like a piñata – that's forgivable. Not this. It shouldn't happen to a dog.

Leslie Mann and wild-card Chris Hemsworth, as her cock-flashing hubby, get the heartiest hoots. The rest is comic history warmed over.

Jammed with story threads that don’t cohere, Cirque commits the cardinal sin for a vampire movie: It’s bloodless.

Independence Day: Resurgence pretends there's fresh ground to cover. There isn't, but director Roland Emmerich makes a good show of faking it.

Don't hammer this film for trying to get inside the head of Mark David Chapman before he shot John Lennon outside the rock legend's New York apartment on December 8th, 1980. Hammer it instead for failing to do so with any depth or insight.

Penelope is dead on arrival.

Questions: Did everyone involved in this botched thriller OD on speed? Does jimmy-legs director D.J. Caruso think if he slowed down the action we'd figure out how stupid the plot is?

Except for Kate Winslet's fearsome turn as a villain, the only terror Divergent roused in me was that the drag-ass thing would never end. Sorry, I'm a Candor.

The Host basically comes down to a vote for Team Jared or Team Ian. I voted myself into oblivion about half an hour in. Niccol, who once added mystery and suspense to the sci-fi of 1997's "Gattaca," is no match for the giant marshmallow that is The Host.

Political satire is so rare that it's a shame to watch the reliable Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland lend their talents to one that is blind to its own incompetence.

What's good? A mesmeric, bottle-blond Christopher Walken as Max Zorin, hellbent on global domination as a product of Nazi experiments, Grace Jones' zowie star at his henchman, and Duran Duran's title song. Otherwise, I'm out.

Looks aren't everything. Case in point: Sucker Punch, a dazzling visual design that goes tone-deaf every time it opens its dumb mouth or makes claims to profundity.

Buffy isn't heinous, just disposable. As a friend tells Buffy while she eyes a fashion purchase, "It's so five minutes ago."

Whatever qualms you might have about romanticizing mental illness, the misguided Benny and Joon thinks it's just darling.

Director Brett Ratner could boast solid source material in the five-issue Radical Comics series Hercules: The Thracian Wars by the late Steve Moore. They had a shot at something here, and they blew it.

Kasdan has inexplicably reduced flesh-and-blood characters to cartoons.

The Vow is a sopping hankie of a romance for women who love to suffer and the men who love them.

Sadly, what Parkland becomes is a crying shame.

Every paying audience member deserves their 12 bucks back.

The movie has been on ice awaiting release for over a year, owing to the bankruptcy of its studio, Relativity. But some of the jokes were moldy long before that happened. Masterminds owes us our two hours back.

This big-screen Hamlet, pumped up to operatic scale by overkill director Franco Zeffirelli, exposes Gibson's shortcomings.

A sappy-sweet romcom that seems to have been invaded by a screenwriter - one Geoff LaTulippe - with delusions that he's David Mamet.

What's onscreen feels squeezed, truncated and curiously embalmed. It's got no kick to it.

It's damn hard to enjoy a thriller when you don't, won't, can't believe a word of it.

I found myself wishing that Taymor would turn off the sound and fury and let The Tempest speak for itself. My wish wasn't granted.

It's not easy hanging talents like Ferrell and Hart out to dry. But Get Hard gets the job done. It's one limp noodle.

Director Sydney Pollack zapped out a taut thriller in "Three Days of the Condor". But The Firm is mostly flab, in the manner of Pollack's elephantine Havana.

A borrowed idea -- hello, "Blade Runner," hi there, "Matrix" -- but an idea nonetheless.

Even the stalwart Nolte drowns in the laughable idiocy of the Wingo-Lowenstein love affair, which lifts Tides to the fiasco class.

The movie deserves a stake through the heart.

McCarthy falls into the same trap she did in "Tammy" and "The Boss," the two other movies she wrote with her husband/director Ben Falcone. By that we mean she allows her laugh instincts to get buried in a blanket of bland.

What hurts is that filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love did it better just a few months ago in "Eden," about the French house movement since the 1990s. In this movie, James tells Cole the ideal EDM track would work up the heart-rate of the crowd to 128 beats-per-minute. We Are Your Friends never even gets us to break a sweat.

Lowry took chances with her novel. The movie of The Giver takes none. It's safe, sorry and a crashing bore.

Some may feel like this smirking sex farce goes down easy. Others may choke on it – or worse, feel like they've wandered into the cinematic equivalent of Christian Grey's Red Room of Pain?

It's not just that Jennifer Lopez looks lost and out of her league acting with Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman. That's to be expected. It's the drag-ass solemnity of this turgid family drama that makes you crazy.

Drab in the extreme. Timothy Dalton's second and wheezing, final turn as 007 was barely recognizable as a Bond film.

The compensation comes in the three lead actors, all way too good for the material dished out by writer-director Tom Gormican.

Another January dud. Broken City drops hot-shot actors in a quicksand of clichés and watches them sink.

Regrettably, Bergman can't do much with a one-note script by Jane Anderson that reduces Perez to a grating cliché, Cage and Fonda to a parody of Ken and Barbie and our interest in what could happen to them to dry ash.

There's nothing to keep the pulse alive after the first quake. Peyton throws in a second quake and a tsunami, but after a while buildings tumbling into the ocean are just a bunch of pixels turning everything into visual mush and leaving audiences in a digital stupor.

For stranding these talents in a one-gag movie that wears thin somewhere between the first choir practice and the second chase, the filmmakers should say a sincere Act of Contrition.

The money shots of the living tableau are padded with jokes that feel embalmed before the actors get them out of their mouths.

What the film lacks is suspense, surprise (the new ending is a dud) and passion.

If you don't see where this is going, you've never seen a movie. Sorry it had to be this one.

By the end, Vantage Point is such a unholy mess of drooling sentiment and sloppy loose ends that you’ll hate yourself for being suckered in.

At least it looks super fly. It's too bad that Director X (born Julien Christian Lutz), the Canadian short-form film master for the likes of Rihanna, Drake and Nicki Minaj, stumbles when he has to stretch a scene past video length.

A patently bogus romcom in which every note rings false.

Jolie comes to this party ready to bite, but the movie muzzles her. Even at 97 minutes, Maleficent is still one long, laborious slog.

What happened, bitches? Didn't the letdown of The Hangover Part II – basically Part I set in Thailand but minus the laughs – teach you anything? Guess not.

Then there's the movie itself, which should be crazy, stupid fun but settles for just stupid.

What have you done to The Wolfman, Hollywood? It’s got no kick to it. No fun either. And no real scares, which is more unforgivable.

Williams is an actor of protean gifts, a super pitchman when it comes to putting across flimsy material (Dead Poets Society). But even he can't palm off this lemon as a peach. When it's not being offensive, Ken Friedman's screenplay is merely oafish.

With that cast, we rightfully expect fireworks. What we get is the film equivalent of a wet blanket.

The film wants to make a case for Parker as the first modern woman. It gets the look and the attitude right, but it can't find her heart.

First-time filmmaker Kate Barker-Froyland trusts the silences that occur when two people aren't talking. That's a good thing. What's not so good is when the talk grows enervating.

Working from a script by the gifted Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Atonement), who seems to have traded his wit for a paycheck, Fontaine manages the trick of making sex joyless. Like porn. Then she tops that by draining her film of variety, longing and feminist insight. Like farce. Ouch.

What Dick rendered potent, Nolfi renders preposterous.

Patrick Lussier is listed as The Director, though I saw no evidence of anyone in control.

No trite, tear-jerking cliché goes undrooled in the script by director Kirk Jones.

Hanks is one of the most likable actors on the planet. But Inferno just lays there onscreen, pancake-flat and with no animating spark to make us give a damn.

The Book of Henry starts well, begins flirting with absurdity in the middle – and ends in crashing disaster. But the feeling persists that director Colin Treverrow believes every word in the shambles of a 20-year-old screenplay by crime novelist Gregg Hurwitz.

It plays like like a video game in which the goal is to kill as many of these green-blooded monsters as you can before time's up. It's fun for about 10 minutes, and then the tedium seeps in.

Offensive on multiple levels -- if only the plot had any levels at all -- Black Snake Moan leaves no "Tobacco Road" cliche unsmoked. Ricci gives it her all, and then some, but even her body and Jackson's blues can't heal a movie that rockets plum off its nut.

Shopworn propaganda.

This Endless Love is a photo shoot, not a movie. It'd play better as a slideshow of jpgs. Even nine-year-old girls ought to cry foul on this movie's endless blandness.

All cast members seem willing to make total fools of themselves for our delectation. A fine but futile gesture. The bad news is that even with such yeoman efforts, it's still impossible to drag one tired joke around for nearly two hours. Like Bernie, the movie ends up dead on its feet.

This afternoon-TV special trying to pass as a real movie earns an extra half star solely for Samuel L. Jackson, who brings his usual fire to the role.

What's lacking is emotional weight. It's sad to watch a talented cast, including Bill Nunn as Henry's physical therapist and Donald Moffat, Rebecca Miller and Kirby Mitchell as co-workers, selling bromides.

First-time director and screenwriter Hue Rhodes shows no discernible talent for dialogue, humor and, especially, pacing.

I've been told the movie plays best with very young girls. That's an insult very young girls should not be forced to endure.

Jeez, did the "surprise" climax have to be this eye-rollingly stupid?

Watching the stars try to out-cutesy the mutt is one for the puke bucket.

Magicians have been pulling rabbits out of hats for ages. And yet, with all this talent, no one can make a decent script materialize.

So Risen joins the swelling ranks of faith-based films that pander to audiences instead of serving them.

The spectacle feels lifeless and what could have been a challenging moral provocation dissolves into sappy, feel-good pandering. Lawrence and Pratt deserve better. So do audiences.