Rene Rodriguez

The kind of schlocky, disposable time-killer that once might have starred Jean-Claude Van Damme, The Impostor is a relentlessly dull chase flick with an inexplicably high-toned cast.

It's just as boring and dumb as it sounds. This is the kind of movie that uses a shot of a bare butt as a punch line, and thinks having Encino Man's Brendan Fraser do a walk-on re- enaction of that movie's frog-eating scene is a clever cameo. As if. And Shore needs to freshen up his act: You can only act like a buffoon for so long before people start thinking of you as one. Remember Andrew Dice Clay? [2 July 1993, p.G5]

There’s nothing more to this movie than the set-up. Even though Cypher is slowly bleeding to death, and Kitai is running out of oxygen capsules that allow him to breathe in the toxic air, there’s no sense of urgency, either. At least Shyamalan, sensing the thinness of the material, doesn’t stretch things out.

The Wedding Planner dissolves into a mopey, leaden romance that piles on the contrivances before limping to its foregone -- and rote -- conclusion.

Start with a heaping helping of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Throw in some "Percy Jackson," a dash of "Twilight," a spoonful of "The Vampire Diaries" and a sprinkling of "Harry Potter," and you end up with The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.

Jade is the latest offering from sleazemeister screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct, Sliver, Showgirls), and just as you'd expect, this movie has lots of sex, lots of violence, and little plausibility or wit. [13 Oct 1995, p.4G]

Considering the horrible buzz that had dogged the movie since its trailers first premiered, The Punisher turns out to be a likable underdog.

[A] visually stunning, technically impressive and crushingly dumb and overlong picture.

The problem with I Love You, Beth Cooper is that aside from Denis' speech at the start, everything else seems familiar.

What Passion ultimately lacks most, ironically, is passion, the artistic fervor that distinguished all his best pictures. This one feels like a throwaway by a gifted filmmaker who has run out of ideas.

More toy commercial than movie.

Steve Jobs, which by many accounts plays loose with the facts, is at its weakest when it tries to humanize its protagonist.

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

This is a disastrously clumsy, heavy-handed movie, one so desperate and exploitative that it resorts to putting a live grenade in the hands of a baby in order to get its message across.

The whole thing feels at least three summers too stale.

The liveliest and most engaging time killer to come out of Hollywood in a long while. It's junk, to be sure, but it is superbly made junk.

Curiously (and contrary to what its ads would have you believe), Aspen Extreme is painfully discreet when it comes to sex. Whenever the characters engage in a romantic liaison, Hasburgh nervously cuts away right after the first kiss. It's as erotic -- or even romantic -- as skinny dipping in ice water. The skiing sequences are the movie's saving grace, exquisitely photographed and thrilling to watch. If you go, try to stick around until the avalanche scene near the end: It's impressive, and it's the only thing you'll remember. [26 Jan 1993, p.E2]

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

The sci-fi thriller Repo Men gets off to a sluggish start. But wait. You have to give the movie time to find its groove and establish its premise.

The film will probably play a lot better in dorm rooms with plenty of beer kegs and bongs on hand, but in the confines of a movie theater, it's deadly - the sort of bad comedy Mel Brooks made late in his career, until he finally smartened up and quit.

The action, which bookends the movie, is atrocious, defying all laws of gravity and physics and machine gun-edited into incomprehensible lunacy.

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.

In a simple, direct manner, Gunner Palace reminds you that the thousands of faceless, nameless troops in Iraq are still there after you switch off CNN.

Monumentally silly thriller.

A fairly tedious, stupid picture.

The filmmakers capture enough of the book's essence -- and the power of its knockout, transcendent ending -- to more than justify the movie's existence.

It's up to O'Donnell to carry the show, and he's simply not up to the task.

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

Tomb is the kind of movie you sit through dreading the expository scenes, because the acting is so bad and the dialogue so pointedly written to make sure the little ones in the audience can keep up with the plot.

There’s exactly one good scene in all of The Hangover Part III, a hilarious bit of business halfway during the end credits that reminds you what made the original film so good.

Here, finally, is a superhero movie your AP English teacher can enjoy.

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

Silly, overplotted conspiracy thriller.

If watching people having their faces cut off, getting their legs amputated and having their throats tenderly slit is your idea of a horrific good time, you'll certainly get your money's worth here.

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

This is a slight and unessential picture, but its quirky, compassionate tone seems destined to attract a cult following, and members of high-school drama clubs everywhere will be riveted.

There's terrific, spontaneous chemistry between Sandra Bullock and Denis Leary. Watching them bounce lines off each other is one of the biggest pleasures of Two If By Sea, a helter-skelter concoction that's part romantic comedy, part heist film and part New England travelogue...But Two If By Sea (which Leary also co-wrote) is a mess in the story department, with so many different elements competing for screen time, its stars' considerable charm ends up too diluted. [15 Jan 1996, p.5C]

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.

So lazy and rote, it feels like a rerun the first time you watch it.

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.

The movie is pure product, and proud of it: There isn't a single surprising moment in all of its 88 minutes, because Domestic Disturbance is designed to stick to tried-and-true formulas, instead of shaking them up a little.

Timeline gives Gigli serious competition for worst film of the year honors.

Gas -- the hot air variety -- is exactly what Driven is made of.

You Again is at its funniest in the early scenes, when everyone is pretending all is well beneath forced smiles and plotting eyes.

Time to give the shoot-’em-up thing a rest, guys: It’s tired and played out, and so are you.

But the movie itself, despite a pretty funny scene early on in which Mitchell, a dyed-in-the-wool California surfer, tries to ingratiate himself to a class full of urban Cincinnati kids, is dull and conventional. Nice stunts, though. [21 Sept 1993, p.E6]

This excruciatingly dumb, formulaic picture, which somehow required the work of four screenwriters but contains not even one single, fleeting moment of wit or humor.

Dragonheart is a silly, foolhardy epic, a movie so thoroughly misconceived it's as if its creators set out to make a big, expensive film few people would want to see -- and one that would frustrate those who did. [31 May 1996, p.5G]

Does anyone openly admit to enjoying these things? Small kids may find Ernest's slapstick antics mildly amusing, but even the most fervent Ernest fan (if there is such a thing) will grow tired and annoyed very quickly here. [12 Nov 1993, p.E4]

The Ugly Truth is insulting to women, men and even goldfish.

Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker are supposed to pass for a married couple, but they have all the chemistry of two actors who just met and shook hands moments before the cameras rolled. They don't even seem to like each other much.

Winds up suffocating you with its aura of bogus, store-bought nostalgia.

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

There isn't a moment in the entire picture in which you will recognize an element of your own life.

If this is magic, I'll take "Gigli."

This is the most impressive directorial debut since"Reservoir Dogs." Being John Malkovich is weird, all right-- the best kind of weird, the kind you haven't seen before.

Although there's no denying the threadbare nature of the script, watching Murphy riff can be a formidable entertainment on its own.

Never achieves takeoff.

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

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.

This is the kind of colossally misguided vanity project.

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

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]

Corny? You bet. But it also proves surprisingly inviting -- for a while, anyway.

Georgia Rule is so artificial, it feels like more of a flow chart than a slice of life.

The dumbest, most risible retelling ever made of the exploits of legendary bank robber Jesse James.

Has a made-for-TV smallness (it will probably be a big hit on cable), and it never quite vanquishes the nagging suspicion that you could be spending your time better elsewhere.

A fluffy, feel-bad drama, with some serious things to say about the viability of homosexual men as fathers and role models.

No atmosphere, no tension -- nothing but Costner, flailing away. It's a buggy drag.

Surprisingly enjoyable.

Eye For an Eye is a Charles Bronson revenge flick with Sally Field in the Bronson role: It's Death Wish Gidget , and it's ridiculous. [12 Jan 1996, p.6G]

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.

Abduction is a crass and lowbrow attempt to cash in on a young actor's heat - an exploitation picture where the person being taken advantage of is too young to notice.

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.

Turns resoundingly dumb in its last 40 minutes.

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

It is absolutely, inexcusably terrible.

Feels like it's been pasted together from 51 other movies -- none of them good.

Getaway makes the Transformers movies seem like they were shot in slow motion. You see all these vehicles smashing into each other, but the movie is never thrilling.

A shockingly, unbelievably bad movie.

The brothers (Farrelly) produced Say It Isn't So, which bears their stamp in every frame and features all of the elements their movies are known for, except one: laughter.

Bad enough to earn a rare spot on my hallowed list of ''The Worst Movies I've Ever Seen,'' An American Carol is testament that the country's culture wars are raging just as strongly within Hollywood as anywhere else.

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.

The movie is a lowbrow showcase for an equally lowbrow comedian, and how much of it you can endure depends entirely on how you feel about Kattan.

Nostalgia is part of the modest charm of this disposable but inoffensive picture. Old Dogs makes old dogs out of all of us.

Gummo isn't so much a movie as it is an experiment, and, taken on those terms, it is a fascinating piece of work. Repellent, disgusting and ugly, yes -- but still fascinating. [23 Jan. 1998, p.5G]

Bad enough to make even James Gandolfini and Catherine O'Hara seem dull.

Gigli's awfulness is of a rarer, more precious variety. It's the sort of bizarre, ill-conceived picture you can't believe exists, but are secretly glad it does.

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.

Hogan could actually hold his own in a supporting role in an action-oriented flick, but his casting here has all the subtlety of a WWF Wrestling match. Mr. Nanny, which runs a scant 85 minutes but feels far longer, has no business on the big screen and should prove encouraging to aspiring filmmakers: If somebody paid money to make this thing, they'll pay to make anything. [12 Oct 1993, p.E7]

This is easily one of the silliest, most preposterous thrillers ever made, and the only reason it didn't go straight to video has to be that it stars Pacino.

It's as stupid, unimaginative and cheesy as the rest of them. [16 Aug 1993, p.C2]

The most intriguing thing about Lost Souls is how it managed to attract so much talent.

As pathetic and unfunny as comedies get. In fine bait-and-switch fashion, you find out -- too late, of course -- that the movie revealed all its best gags in the TV ads and trailers. [12 July 1993, p.C5]

At the very least, Corman would have remembered to make the movie fun.

If you're going to direct a piece of crass, nonsensical junk, at least have the decency to release it straight to video, where it belongs.

A feather-light musical rushed into production to capitalize on American Idol-frenzy, is nothing more than an excuse to give the two leads several musical numbers, a la those Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello "Beach Blanket Bingo" movies, and with just about the same amount of substance, too.

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

Formidably stupid.

A sluggish, soporific dud, the dreariest big-budget science-fiction adventure since "Dune."

The Mangler is one of the worst movies we've seen in years, and we've seen a lot of movies. [6 Mar 1995, p.5C]