Rene Rodriguez

A compendium of missed opportunities, uninspired action and clichés so tired, you wish the screenwriters had called 911, too.

The whole thing feels at least three summers too stale.

Neither as good nor as bad as you'd hoped it would be: It's just a mediocre exploitation picture with an inspired premise (succinctly spelled out by its title), loads of gratuitous gore, a dash of equally gratuitous nudity and enough inanities to make you wonder if Ed Wood rose from the grave to serve as a creative consultant on the project.

The movie is all moist grime and seedy atmosphere, and it's certainly something to look at: It's beautifully lurid. But it's an empty, unengaging movie, and by the end, it has become ridiculous, too.

There are three or four big laughs scattered throughout The Pink Panther 2, along with a smattering of decent chuckles. But all those moments combined account for maybe five minutes of screen time, which leaves you with another hour and a half of movie to sit through.

Misses out on just about everything that made the original work, most notably Falk and Arkin, whose odd-couple pairing was the foundation on which the entire movie rested.

You know this supposedly risqué comedy is in trouble when the funniest gag involves a foot cramp during sex.

Demolition is so busy trying to be profound, the film doesn’t have much use for humor.

The film is so gleefully ridiculous that you start to suspect the filmmakers were in on the joke and forgot to tell the actors.

There's nothing here that hasn't been done before, and better, in any given "Halloween" or "Friday the 13th" sequel.

In the end, they are only moments, and even at a merciful 86 minutes, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights feels formidably long.

This is a gleefully repulsive movie. Spun is bound to be described as bold and cutting-edge by those who confuse shock value with achievement. Most people, however, will just long for a shower after it's over.

Certainly a grand-looking picture. For a film that's filled with CGI effects, there wasn't a single shot that looked artificial, and the production design is tremendous. But it's a hollow, boring spectacle.

Homefront is done in by uninspired action scenes in which Statham’s athletic prowess is rendered unwatchable by hyper-editing, a shameful reliance on child-in-peril cliches to move the story forward, and so many loose ends that you wonder if 20 minutes were accidentally cut out from the movie.

The result is almost suffocating: a movie that has been tinkered and fussed with until there is no spontaneity left -- no warmth or life or messiness.

Has all the depth of an episode of "Joey."

This new, presumably improved Chainsaw is just as humorless as the original, but it's also slicker, glossier and resoundingly artificial.

The fact that Swept Away got made at all implies there simply is no dissuading Madonna from her movie-star aspirations. Her tenacity is admirable, but it's also block-headed.

It's a redundant comedy, like hearing the same tired joke for the 100th time.

No matter how much good will the actors generate, Showtime eventually folds under its own thinness.

For the story of a man who made his mark on pop culture by being a likable buffoon, the irritatingly arch Confessions of a Dangerous Mind takes itself way too seriously.

Despite the actors' admirable efforts, everyone in The Door in the Floor is too affected, too fancifully written, to come off as anything other than conceits.

The latest collaboration between Cohen and director Larry Charles proves the formula they created with "Borat" and then started to milk dry with "Brüno" has finally run out of juice. Time to move on, guys.

More toy commercial than movie.

An overly convoluted, tiresome mystery that exists primarily to antagonize the audience, Basic consists almost entirely of dense exposition, then concludes by laughing at anyone who tried to pay attention.

The Warcraft hardcore can rejoice. Everyone else can move along. There’s not much to see here.

Singleton's sloppiest, laziest movie to date, springing to life in fits and starts, risibly mawkish and occasionally gripping, and often feeling like it was made up on the set.

Even though Taking Lives is not very good, it does contain a) a cool car chase and b) a sex scene in which Jolie goes topless. For some, this will be enough entertainment.

An insufferably artsy, pretentious work, the sort of picture that gives art films a bad name.

A forced and wholly unnecessary sequel.

Death to Smoochy? Yes, please.

There are frothy romantic comedies and then there is Jet Lag, a movie so thin it borders on nonexistence.

Feels static and constricted, its intensity dulled by overreliance on dialogue.

There is absolutely nothing in this prequel/remake that improves on the first film or negates it in any way. If you've never seen The Thing - and you really should - stick with the genuine 1982 article and skip this elaborate act of mimicry.

Art School Confidential, the first disappointment from director Terry Zwigoff, is all glum, dour cynicism.

In Snow White and the Huntsman, this talented but woefully miscast actress (Stewart) is expected to rally an entire army of soldiers, even though she usually looks like she forgot the combination to her locker.

The unrelentingly dull Where the Money Is tests his (Newman's) legendary charisma in a way no actor could overcome.

Jason Statham gives the best performance. Dolph Lundgren gets the best character arc. Terry Crews gets the best gun. Jet Li gets the best kill (you'll know it when you see it).Arnold Schwarzenegger gets the best cameo. And Sylvester Stallone? He gets the blame.

A fairly tedious, stupid picture.

Director Maren doesn’t trust Shannon to convey this inner monologue via his performance — just one example of the film’s plodding lack of wit or sophistication.

Jurassic World gives you exactly what Howard’s character promises at the beginning — More! Bigger! Faster! — but you know there’s something deeply wrong with a film that expects you to shed tears over digitally created prehistoric creatures and rubber brontosaurus heads instead of rooting for, you know, people.

There's a startling moment 10 or 15 minutes into The Adjustment Bureau - the only time, really, when the film achieves any level of surprise. The dispiriting dullness of this dreary misfire hasn't had time to settle in and thicken: The movie hasn't yet revealed its utter and thorough ineptitude.

The best stuff in Jumper comes early, while the movie is still busy explaining its scenario. It's only when all the pieces are in place and the story actually kicks in that things start to fall apart, and quickly.

Take away the art direction, and Johnny Mnemonic is nothing more than a clunky chase flick, done with little skill or subtlety. [27 May 1995, p.6G]

Most certainly a personal work -- so personal, in fact, that I can't imagine anyone but Coppola being able to sit through it.

Glitter, the kind of movie only 11-year-old girls who dot their i's with hearts would find bearable.

A soulless, witless, landfill contraption that Smith once would have mocked mercilessly.

Never achieves takeoff.

Men in Black 3 is so dull and empty, it's the first movie that has ever made me think "Thank God this is in 3D."

The things that stay with you are the dull, boilerplate love story, the laziest performance of Liam Neeson’s career as a murderous gunslinger and the distracting amount of makeup Seth MacFarlane sports in the film.

Even the most forgiving moviegoer will recognize this movie as the blatant cash-grab that it is.

Shyamalan takes the beloved Nickelodeon anime series -- the full title was Avatar: The Last Airbender -- and turns it into 103 minutes of overproduced, stilted nonsense.

Fantastic Four is so bereft of all the things we expect from a superhero movie — humor, excitement, adventure, awe — that it plays like a drawn-out pilot episode for an upcoming TV series no one would ever watch again.

There's something innately distasteful about The Crush. Here's a movie that casts a hopelessly lovestruck -- and mentally disturbed -- teenager as a villain. The camera ogles Silverstone's body every chance it gets, then invites you to hiss at her as she goes about her evil deeds. What's more, the movie -- which is nothing more than the latest take on the increasingly routine female-from-hell genre -- takes itself very seriously, giving the proceedings a realism that only serves to heighten the unsavoriness of the thing. [8 Apr 1993, p.F3]

The movie, however, is the sort of picture in which people run around doing everything except the most logical thing to do, because that’s the only way to keep the nonsensical plot spinning.

Jack and Jill contains long stretches of squirm-inducing tedium in which Sandler riffs and ad-libs far longer than he should.

If Annapolis is not the worst movie to date of this still-young year, it is certainly the most hackneyed, as well as the most depressing.

Looks exquisite, but don't bother digging deeper.

Sitting through Little Fockers is a soul-sucking, dispiriting experience.

There isn’t a moment of spontaneous fun or humor in this long, turgid movie, the latest let-down for rabid DC Comics fans who’ve been waiting for someone to pick up the baton Christopher Nolan left behind and do this universe justice. With “Suicide Squad,” the long wait continues.

Who writes this stuff, anyway? Does this not sound like utter gibberish? Surely, this film did not actually get made, did it? Yes, it did. I have seen it. But you, oh, fortunate one, don't have to. Consider yourself lucky.

Every summer movie season usually has at least one spectacular, disastrous flame-out, and although the dog days of August still loom, I doubt there will come a big-budget blockbuster worse than Cowboys and Aliens.

The problem with Revolver is that it is Ritchie's first attempt at a ''serious'' look at the underworld, but the result is so pretentious and muddled it's almost a little embarrassing.

So needlessly convoluted, so crammed with subplots within subplots, it simply forgets about its gangland "Romeo & Juliet" premise.

Lands with a thud right from its painfully unfunny prologue and maintains its plodding, exasperating course straight through to its car-chase-and-shootout finale.

The more Shrink tries to get you invested in the emotional turmoil of its characters, the more you want to reach into the screen and shake them and tell them to get over themselves.

After a while, hearing Martin say ''Zee area eez zecure!'' doesn't cut it any longer, and that's pretty much all The Pink Panther has to offer.

On Deadly Ground has all the thrills and suspense of a rerun of Barney and Friends. [22 Feb 1994, p.D5]

For a B-movie, Split Second contains a surprising amount of talk -- dull talk. The film could use more action sequences; even those it does have are badly handled and unexciting. [7 May 1992, p.F8]

Few expected Basic Instinct 2 to be very good, but no one expected it to be this boring.

A failure on every conceivable level -- from its trite, pedestrian dialogue to its static, torturous pacing.

An unsatisfying, overly restrained bore, capped off by an ending so strange and inconclusive, it feels like something you'd find on the ''deleted scenes'' portion of a DVD.

So thunderously unfunny...There is no reason for an 82-minute movie to feel so very, very long.

A horror/sci-fi/action mishmash that aims to be the kind of brainless timekiller once used to round out the bottom of a double bill at the drive-in.

You'd be hard pressed to find a more routine, more shamelessly by-the- numbers flick than this one. Predictability? In the case of Nowhere to Run, everything feels recycled -- even the title. [21 Jan 1993, p.F5]

It's not every movie that makes you wish Vin Diesel would run in and start blowing up stuff.

Freejack is among the most incoherent sci-fi action films we've seen in a while, despite the credentials of producer- screenwriter Ronald Shusett, who brought us Total Recall and Alien. [24 Jan 1992, p.G5]

A handsome, sincere, well-meaning bore.

The times have caught up with Almodóvar, who is now 63: He thinks he’s still pushing the envelope, but he comes off as old-fashioned and outdated.

Lee remains a superb entertainer -- like Oliver Stone, he's incapable of ever being boring -- but in She Hate Me, he comes dangerously close to seeming trivial, a crank-for-crank's-sake.

Formidably stupid.

That's My Boy more than lives up to its R-rating - including one gross-out gag repulsive enough to make you put down your popcorn.

Hard Target is pretty much a bust from every conceivable aspect, except the visual -- it looks terrific, and one sequence, a shoot-out on the streets of New Orleans between Van Damme and a progressively larger number of bad guys, comes close to capturing the trademark frenzied, exhilarating feel of Woo's previous work. [20 Aug 1993, p.5]

Terrifyingly dull movie.

Once the premise has been established, the film goes absolutely nowhere.

So I Married an Axe Murderer is a clumsy mishmash of Saturday Night Live sketches and a rambling comic-thriller plot that wastes the promise of twisted laughs presented by its '50s B-movie title. [30 July 1993, p.G7]

The best thing you can say about Just a Kiss is that it isn't every romantic comedy that throws in suicide, bondage and a plane crash in between all the bed hopping.

Mr. Jones is an even bigger disappointment when you consider it's directed by Mike Figgis (Internal Affairs, Liebestraum), who has shown talent for off-kilter thrillers. Saddled with a routine and unimaginative script here, he indulges in well-worn cliches, including setting his big scene between Gere and Olin against a thunderstorm (which inadvertently drowns out part of Olin's dialogue). [9 Oct 1993, p.G4]

Enormous in its scope and colossal in its stupidity.

Even a supporting turn by Vincent Cassell as Otto Gross, a fellow psychiatrist, cocaine addict and unapologetic adulterer, fails to enliven the movie: A Dangerous Method makes even a cokehead hedonist boring.

The tone is all over the place, which makes the movie difficult to take neither seriously nor as popcorn fluff.

Momoa, a familiar face from "Game of Thrones" to "Baywatch," has the muscles but not the imposing persona and barbaric presence that Conan requires.

Where "Seven" seemed to radiate diabolical evil, Saw just radiates idiocy.

Another joyless, brain-numbing adventure through lackluster Indiana Jones territory.

In its early moments, the movie evokes everything from "The Social Network" to "Casino." By the end, the film has become as exciting as a game of Old Maid. R-rated thrillers are hardly ever this dull and listless, but this movie manages to eradicate all of Timberlake’s charisma and makes you flash back to Affleck’s "Paycheck"/"Gigli" era. How does this even happen?

Emits a fishy odor, like a recruitment film for an obscure cult you'd rather stay away from.

Everything about this excruciatingly dull, talky film screams made-for-network-TV: The I'm-only-here-for-a-paycheck performances by famous actors; the Crate and Barrel catalog mise-en-scene; the syrupy, heartwarming score that lays the pathos on so thickly you gag on it.

Sarandon blends into the background, having practically nothing to do except stand around and wring her hands as the two men in her life battle it out in a passive-aggressive war. It's enough to make her want to run off with Thelma.