Rick Groen

Friedkin has huffed and puffed and blown up a single chase sequence into the whole damn movie. You got your hunted, you got your hunter, and away they go. And go and go.

With Things Are Tough All Over their once well-oiled comedy has rusted firmly into place. Now, the erstwhile darlings of the counter-culture seem about as raucously rebellious as a senescent Lucy Ricardo. [2 Aug 1982]

The irony is worth noting: Back when it was really 1949, Hollywood made noir with teeth; this is nougat with pretensions.

It's better than 2, but not nearly as good as 1. On the slippery slope of sequel-land, that's an okay average. [15 May 1992]

A recruitment poster loosely disguised as a movie.

The plot-turns are mounting by the minute, but they're not making a lick of sense. In fact, they're smacking of desperation, the sort of desperation that incites a writer to pull "taut" so tightly that all logic snaps, the sort that drives the movie on and on and on in search of a convincing third act and a resolving climax. [10 Feb 1992]

When it gets right down to the climactic business at hand and arm, even the imposing skills of a Golan are put to a rigorous test. For, despite its obvious delights, armwrestling just can't compare to 10 bloody rounds from a pair of vigorous maulers or a brace of chattering machine-guns. [17 Feb 1987]

This hunk of celluloid flotsam will come back sooner rather than later, washed up on the remote shelves of your local video store. My advice: shred the message, recycle the bottle.

If plot were oats, Wicker Park would choke a horse.

The whole picture plays like a pop-up book in a welfare agency.

Call it "Alexander the Grate," because, over the marathon of its three-hour running time, this wonky epic really does get on your nerves.

An intermittently watchable movie. Not because the plot is any less silly, or the theme any more mature, but for the simple reason that, on the margins of this marginal picture, there are several wonderful faces -- sometimes belonging to actors who know how to use them, and sometimes attached to folks who merely inhabit them. In either case, however, the visual result is an incongruous slice of vintage Americana pared off the usual slab of Hollywood mediocrity. [9 Sept 1997]

Just a guffaw here, a chuckle there, ho-hum, and that's all, folks. [27 Jan 1989]

Don't look for logic here. But if gore is your game, a motherlode awaits.

The refined taste insists on risibly bad, on hysterically bad, on poke-your-seatmate-in-the-ribs bad, and this falls well short of that hallowed mark -- it's just routinely bad.

Even the neatness here is borrowed. A Kiss Before Dying isn't a remake; it's a rehash. [27 Apr 1991]

It's Footloose Loose In The Third Reich and, even with your expectations kept knee-high to a kindergarten, you might have at least hoped for some finger-poppin' music and a few great dance scenes. Sorry. Here, too, things come up short. [05 Mar 1993]

It's a mini-masterwork of acting. Stahl is definitely one to watch closely -- he's the real deal. But the emerging plot isn't.

Lumpy title, lively movie. Dead Man Down proves to be a frisky gangster flick cum elaborate thriller cum off-beat romance. Yep, there’s a whole lot going on here, but this is one of those plot-heavy scripts that carries its weight with confidence – the intricate twists don’t cheat.

Plot ain't where it's at here. An Innocent Man is guilty as charged and innocent as hell. [06 Oct 1989]

The result is a small independent film suffering from a severe case of Hollywood-itis. A cautionary tale minus the caution, Just a Kiss is just a cop-out.

The dialogue is an occasionally witty cut above the norm, partly because director Greg Berlanti goes easy on those cute baby reaction shots, but mainly because of something rather more valuable: screen chemistry.

The flames sure look real, but everything else in Backdraft, director Ron Howard's inflatable ode to firefighters, seems about as genuine as a plastic log in an electric hearth. Howard's particular type of schmaltz works well enough in small dabs on comic canvases (Splash, Cocoon, even Parenthood), but pumped up to heroic proportions, the sentimentality is just plain silly - in this case, cheap melodrama on a two-hour jag.

Other than a few gratuitous montage sequences, plus a patently clumsy echo of the shopping scene in "Pretty Woman," Marshall refuses to pull his share of the load, forcing his beleaguered cast to fend for themselves.

Add up these three intentions – the down-and-dirty tone, the tender and uplifting message, the starring vehicle – and the math ain't funny. Bottom line: This movie is a whole lot less than the sum of its parts.

Arthur and the Invisibles may be a tale for children, but it's got the bad habits of a profligate adult -- the thing borrows shamelessly from its betters and then pretends to be self-sustaining.

This sappy thing is a two-hour cheat that never plays fair for a nanosecond.

Bursting with potential that never gets realized.

Nevertheless, in mid-reverie, there's no denying the pleasure in falling under its little spell -- till human voices wake us, and we frown.

Another Nicholas Sparks novel, another cinematic brush with insulin shock.

Whoopi (a beleaguered figure these days) single-handedly cranks up the volume now and again, earning a chuckle or two, but then settles lazily back, apparently content to bank on the formula and imagine the box- office. [10 Dec 1993]

Remember the final page of Gatsby, a real American tragedy, when the green light beckons us into an ever-receding future? Now that was a mystery. This is, well, Pittsburgh.

We know to a certainty what will happen. More to the point, the writers know that we know. But here’s the intriguing bit: They don’t care. Rather, their job as diligent Tinseltown hacks is simply to devise ways of filling up the remaining 90 minutes.

But wouldn't it be heavenly if a like proportion of Tinseltown producers believed in an existing need for a good script. Because this one ain't good; in fact, it's hellishly mediocre, the kind that aims for holiday charm and settles for workaday torpor.

An exercise in competence guaranteed neither to offend the initiated nor to charm anyone else.

Empire is just too intent on living up to its imperial name -- colonizing other defenceless movies, plundering their rich natural resources, and leaving us all to feel rather cruelly violated. A postscript: Somebody here -- I'm not saying who -- dies. And still keeps on talking.

Smith and Lawrence enjoyed some amusing chemistry in the '95 original, but their molecules sure aren't jibing here. It's a full hour into this behemoth before there's anything resembling a belly laugh.

A feel-good flick that doesn't make you feel too bad -- in this genre, that almost qualifies as a ringing endorsement.

I think that the perfect name for the chick in a chick flick is Rebecca Bloomwood. I know that if Charles Dickens had possessed the good sense to write chick flicks, he could not have done better than Rebecca Bloomwood.

The actors are all better than the material, just as the script's occasionally amusing tangents are far superior to its mundane narrative arc.

Apparently, the faith that can move mountains is detectable in the microscopes that can track electrons. If so, the metaphoric is real and, to me, that thought is as scary as it is thrilling -- but what the bleep do I know?

For a stylish thriller that hinges on the titillating theme of voyeurism, this movie is surprisingly innocuos. [22 May 1993]

The pop-culture answer to a murder-suicide, the kind of flick that serves itself up as the object of its own satire.

As for the old and graceful Jackie, he's completely missing in action, his supple talents sacrificed on the high altar of movie technology -- that frenetic place where superheroes are a colossal bore and real ones are sadly impotent.

Had Crossing Over chosen to tell one of them well, rather than seven badly, it would have made for a fine movie. Instead, all we get is a mess of good liberal intentions loosely anchored to a mass of pure Hollywood hokum.

Trying to be off-the-wall, Amos & Andrew never gets off the ground. It ends up as politically correct as its title, and that ain't funny. [05 Mar 1993]

There must be something about the thriller/horror genre that attracts writers with exactly the same dysfunctional tendencies: They're all great at the foreplay but keep on messing up the climax.

Made of Honor should come with a bar code and a Wal-Mart display - this isn't a movie, it's a commodity. The generic brand is the romantic comedy, and the manufacturer's material of choice is recycled plastic, smoothly glued together to assure the consumer that the purchase is risk-free and thoroughly predictable.

Amelia is the Mack truck of flight. Heavy and lumbering, it delivers the goods, but there's not an ounce of magic in the thing.

Winnie begins as hagiography and ends in hellish confusion.

Guaranteed neither to offend nor delight.

In what is surely a tribute to the dazzling mediocrity of director Luis Llosa, the real jungle looks as bland as the fake jungle.

To her credit, Nadda is a solid actors’ director – the performances here are competent even when the writing isn’t. The exception is South Africa which, although a logistically necessary shooting location, ain’t much of a thespian.

To reduce Leonard to shtick makes about as much sense as using a scalpel for a butter knife — even when the job gets done, it's just such a dull waste of a sharp implement.

Some performances carry a picture, this one bench-presses it. Sean Penn's work here is so mesmerizing, so intense, so guaranteed to put him front and centre when Oscar reads out the nominees, as to almost obscure the multiple failings of the misguided movie around it.

Barely dusted off, the humourless stuff is served up straight - damned if it isn't a Hillbillies homage. [19 Oct 1993]

Here, one begins to suspect that the major impediment is the sensibility of the filmmakers themselves. They don't believe in this stuff, in its unavoidable sentimentality, and that attitude filters down to a perplexed cast.

Dirty Girl isn't. Sorry, but it's just faux grime, a thin layer of bad behaviour that wipes clean with a two-ply tissue to reveal the real movie beneath – all shiny sentimentality.

About a third of the way along, there's a shocking revelation that definitely packs a punch. Problem is, it's followed by a near-immediate return to familiar narrative convention, where the noir ante rises exponentially toward a climax that arrives too hastily and ends too neatly.

The last thing I want is this: Yet another instance of black culture diluting itself by imitating a white model. Hell, Honey is hip-hop by way of Andy Hardy.

Don't mean to boast, but I can suspend my disbelief as willingly as any credulous moviegoer. Yet not even an industrial crane would have helped here.

In the future, as recorded in the bible of British cinema, it will be written that "Four Weddings and a Funeral" begat "The Full Monty" which begat "Billy Elliot" which begat way too many pale imitations struggling to peddle the same brand of sloppy sentimentality. Amen.

A swashbuckler that plays like an over-dressed serial on a slow Saturday afternoon. [22 Dec 1995]

There's something here for everyone to dislike - the whole clan can have fun making fun of this thing.

W.E. is a heavily made-up face masquerading as a movie and demanding to be admired – demands that might just leave you with an acute pain in the other end.

There's a head-pounding, gob-smacking literalness to this flick, extending from the title right through to the recurring imagery.

Apparently, somebody thought it was time for a remake. Clearly, somebody was dead wrong.

Obviously a great respecter of rules, John Badham directs with a metronome, here some glossy action, there some witless banter, dispensing the two like different colored Smarties popped from the box. The bird in Bird On A Wire is a turkey. [19 May 1990]

Don't abandon Abandon. In the movies' long weekly line-up, it stands apart -- innocent of banality, and guilty of nothing more damning than intelligent effort that falls a tad short.

The Secret Of My Success succeeds only on its very limited terms, asking us to forget the flick and remember the star, that cute little package with the endearing Canadian stamp, the flawless comic timing, and the freshest face this side of Care Bear county. Michael J. Fox. So the script is content simply to put your basic romance-comedy through some mighty conventional paces. [04 Apr 1987]

In pairing the two icons, Righteous Kill is definitely an event. What it isn't is much of a movie. Such a waste.

In today's cultural climate, any remake of Conan the Barbarian can only be considered (a) redundant or (b) a cruel case of rubbing salt in our cinematic wounds. Either way, it ain't a pretty sight – in fact, it's downright barbaric.

It's a dumb-ass comedy done strictly for a seriously large paycheque.

Well acted and crisply directed, this latest version can at least make a claim to competence.

Say this for I Am Number Four: It's blessedly free of any original sins. Instead, they're all copied. Here a little "Superman," there a bit of "Spider-Man," now it's "Twilight" with aliens, then it's a spaghetti western with trucks – this thing borrows more heavily than an investment bank in an unregulated market.

What Happens in Vegas should damn well have stayed in Vegas.

Rambo's return is thick with usual thrills. [26 May 1988, p.C1]

After all the cyberspace chat is over, after all the cyberpunk sets are unveiled, what we are left with is a tired theme afforded a banal treatment. [26 May 1995]

Pitched Squarely to the teeny set, Can't Buy Me Love tacks a grade-school moral onto a high-school tale: be yourself, kiddies; don't follow the trendy crowd; popularity ain't what it's cracked up to be. Of course, it says all this while trying desperately to be the most popular flick since box met office. [14 Aug 1987]

Label this one a howler, and add a postscipt to the sequel: shoo Fly II, go forth and don't multiply. [11 Feb 1989]

The original Oh, God was a one-note joke that the irresistible George Burns managed to turn into an engaging film. However, even Burns' charm is insufficient to sustain that note through the inevitable sequel. [07 Oct 1980]

While computer games can boast an abundance of nifty graphics and odious villains and plucky protagonists on long journeys, they're invariably a tad wanting in the cinematic essentials -- you know, stuff like plot and characterization and theme.

What My Blue Heaven has going for it: one funny premise and two earthly delights, in the comic persons of Steve Martin and Rick Moranis. What My Blue Heaven does not have going for it: anything remotely resembling a cohesive script. [22 Aug 1990, p.C4]

Woefully short on script, the picture ends up disappearing down the wormhole of its own premise.

Fabulous idea/faulty execution is the review.

From the base-model script to the assembly-line thrills, everything about Hide and Seek is generic except its star.

Narratively, the film strikes all the sentimental chords that audiences typically find so reassuring, but the music grates here, sounding mechanical and flat, lacking the single ingredient indispensable to any uplifting fable - a charming belief in its own sweet nature. [19 Apr 1996, p. C1]

To be fair, the movie is nothing if not consistent -- the idea is every bit as dumb as the execution.

McCarthy delivers the moment of pathos in a totally different voice, tears staining her puffy face, as feelings awfully real and tainted in tragedy bubble up from deep within the comic persona. It’s startling, it’s wholly incongruous, yet it’s undeniably moving. God, how this woman can act and, within the brief frames of that different film, how we long to see the rest of it.

Oh, it's perfect all right. In fact, The Perfect Score is a flawless example of the classic January movie release -- the kind of studio picture that even the studio loathes, and so consigns to the dumping ground of the year's frosty first month.

It's all meant, I suppose, to conjure up cold visions of Terminators and Robocops past, or, in this post-9/11 world, of bin Ladens and Bushes present. If so, conjure at will.

Dumb and Dumber 'n the hood.

Filled with visual potential, yet Levinson can't tap it. He's just a whole lot more comfortable trying to tame the human software than the technical hardware.

With no help from the dialogue, Kidman doesn't have a clue how to make clueless interesting. Not for lack of trying. Her efforts, which often consist of channelling Elizabeth Montgomery by way of Marilyn Monroe, are painful but insistent.

Meant to be a nodding aside to the film buff, with plenty of in-jokes for the cognoscenti, Crimewave ends up as a random list in dire need of a good file-clerk. [3 July 1987]

Being risibly bad, The Happening is at least worth a laugh. Exactly one laugh, by my reckoning, and completely unintended but no less full-throated for that.

A horror-less horror flick where the monstrous Thing doesn't even put in an appearance until well past the two-thirds mark. Sorry, ugly guy, but that goes way beyond fashionably late. [18 Jan 1989]

Can't have an American Thanksgiving without a turkey.

LawAbiding Citizen smells a bit musty these days. Indeed, in an era when the debate has shifted from too little state vigilance to too damn much, this thing seems almost quaint.

In truth, what follows is less disturbing than intriguing – to audiences hip to the mechanics of horror flicks, it's rare fun to be fooled, and this one is pretty damned clever.

Sure ain't a movie. Nope, it's a product, pure and very simple and carefully tested to sell to the widest possible market.

Confused, and confusing.

No one is likely to mistake Excess Baggage for a great movie, but it is an intriguing piece of pop sociology.

In your typical subpar Hollywood romcom, there’s only one tedious love story to put up with. Well, Valentine’s Day (such a clever title) does a whole lot better than that: It offers 10 tedious love stories to put up with.

Certainty, then, is the watchword, and you can be certain of three things: There will be plenty of juvenile energy to power the vehicle; there will be a few mild chuckles en route; there will be no reason to remember the ride the instant it ends.

It’s hard to argue with the title here – Safe Haven, indeed. This is all about safety in the Hollywood workplace. Why make a movie when making a Hallmark-card-with-dialogue is so much less risky?

Mr. Destiny is a sedated puppy of a movie - meant to be all warm and cuddly, it just lies there like a furry lump, waiting for an invigorating spark that never comes. You almost feel sorry for the inert thing - it wants so much to be loved, and does so little to earn it. [16 Oct 1990]

The tuneful melodies of their favourite band grace the soundtrack, but let's not confuse this with a rock 'n' roll movie -- the music is just the blank canvas awaiting the higher art of the gross-out.

It's all rather wacky and hard to follow or fathom, although maybe that's attributable to Virginia's schizophrenia veering off on its delusional phase.

Often funny, always telling, this is the kind of not- quite-successful comedy that is fraught with not-quite-intentional meaning. From the pun in the title to the echoes in the script, Class is a pop sociologist's dream. [22 July 1983]

For a novel written nearly 300 years ago by a dour Irish cleric with a mad-on about the material world and a satiric mindset dark enough to flirt with misanthropy, it's amazing how well Gulliver's Travels travels. Even Jack Black can't ruin the thing, although not for lack of trying.

The children are engaging yet the script and direction are not, which leaves the thing to get all bogged down in its own derivative mechanics.

Joe Pytka does display an occasional nice touch with mood and atmosphere - at its infrequent best, the humor here is almost wry. But his editing is as jumpy as a mare in heat. [19 Aug 1989]

Yes, Virginia, there is a poop fairy, which is why studio heads persist in tucking the likes of RV under their pillows, confident they'll awaken Monday morning to find all that brown turned straight to green.

A sustained if wildly uncoordinated assault on our senses, complementing those feverish jump cuts with a cliché of equally stunning proportions

C'mon, in matters of haunted-house inhabitation, settling into an ex-mortuary is like renting above a dentist's office -- ashen faces and ghastly screams come with the territory.

In an era when the words "President" and "penis" can occupy the same sentence and prompt nothing but yawns, this picture actually manages to surprise, to startle, yes, to administer a series of small but genuine shocks.

Laugh? Well, once.

In lieu of a movie, we get a series of car chases rudely interrupted by the occasional smattering of dialogue.

The latest offering from the serial scribe who scripted Showgirls has another femme with an overactive libido and not much else. [13 Oct 1995]

There are easily 54 reasons to dis 54, but let's start and finish with the obvious: The script plays like a proud offering from the lead hand at the Cliché Factory.

I confess to a deep uncertainty about whether this can be rightly called a movie. A bunch of scenes, maybe... I confess to a cynical belief that Lola isn't actually a role but just a succession of costume changes.

Being Human is just that, and it's a profound delight. [06 May 1994]

Only the comedy is successful, and only intermittently. [14 Jan 1989]

Imagine, if you dare, the outtakes from all those merely bad romantic comedies. Now further imagine that these discarded bits, the stuff that failed to make even the failures, found their way out of the waste bin and into a splicing machine and onto a projector. Do that and you're inching toward a full appreciation of this particular barrel, and the bottom it so brazenly scrapes.

The laughs just keep rolling as 'Weird Al' makes a movie. Overheard from a still-convulsing woman after a recent screening of Weird Al Yankovic's UHF: "I'm sorry, but that's funny." I'm sorry, but she's right. Yuks you feel obliged to apologize for are yuks nonetheless. And UHF prompts a lot of apologies.

A nice little dream, too, hardly epic but weirdly satisfying, the kind you wake up from and dearly want to re-enter, just for another drowsy moment or two. [3 March 1989]

Watching inept American actors and wishing they were badly dubbed into Japanese isn't any fun at all.

Chetwynd fumbles the job badly. [2 May 1987]

An actual film of unrelenting silliness. Far from being a "miracle of rare device" (yes, the movie even quotes Coleridge), this is a disaster of common occurrence - a poorly directed, ineptly edited, badly photographed bundle of celluloid. [14 Aug 1980]

Max Payne, game or movie, has precious little to say.

Forgettable.

All that's missing are the laughs. In their place, we get wall-to-wall predictability. [13 Aug 1983]

The only surprise here is the real star of the show, who turns out to be not Halle Berry, not even Bruce Willis, but a flat computer screen in all its hard-driven glory.

Gosh, what to say about House of 1000 Corpses? That it's about 999 too many, for starters. Then again, in a picture where the body count is the whole point and the only purpose, carping about the math rather misses the mark.

Will be construed by the faithful as an embarrassment of riches and by the rest of us as cruel and unusual punishment.

Sorry, but this level of insight is readily available from daily news reports.

This isn't a movie so much as a marketing strategy -- a moving poster loosely disguised as a motion picture.

THE PRESIDIO is a formula flick that can't even manage its own simple arithmetic. This is meant to be an action-thriller with comic overtones, the kind where a pair of mismatched cops corral the heavy-duty nasties while treating us to a steady stream of lightweight banter. Because it's a TV premise, brought to half-life by a forgettable script and bland direction, the poor thing seems mighty uncomfortable on the big screen, washed out and embarrassed, eager to abandon the pretense and rush to its rightful home in the movie-of-the-week margins. [10 June 1988]

[Walken's] every minute on screen is filled with that level of jittery invention, and, watching him at play, not even the flintiest temper could resist a wide grin. Envy can surely be a trial, but Saint Christopher is there to ease our troubled journey and see us smilingly home.

Add them up and the sum has a certain mathematical inevitability: Really annoying characters, really annoying movie.

It does the job just fine. That job, as director George Lucas freely admits, is quite simply to thrill the beating hearts and the inquiring minds of 12-year-old boys.

A dull, formulaic romance comedy with an ulterior motive and a sly message. Remarkably, the message is this: "Please Re-elect George Bush."

Essentially a love story, as stripped of sentimentality as the landscape is shorn of green, yet an extraordinary love story nonetheless – powerful and poignant and, even in the midst of hope's imminent extinction, hopeful too.

I doubt that Lawrence is conscious of this process. Nevertheless, stuck in a dull commercial feature, a very good actor happens upon a new solution to an age-old problem: She improves the script by transcending it, and steals the picture by abandoning it.

Damned if Parker hasn't done it again. An intermittently good filmmaker but a consistently bad polemicist, he may well sway opinion here -- but, oops, not in the hoped-for direction.

A lightweight flick about a heavy-duty subject, A Dark Truth plays like a TV movie back in the days when TV wasn't worth watching.

Not just bad, but weirdly, fascinatingly bad.

The concept is high but everything else is merely fair to middling, one more or less watchable B-movie in megabucks clothing.

But Keaton is a mistake. He's an actor with an innate sense of irony firmly grounded in the here and now. Even as Batman, skepticism was his forte; true belief falls way outside his range.

Hey, it’s all good clean fun.

Like a tone-deaf singer at a benefit concert, John Q. is a bad movie appearing on behalf of a good cause.

Adam is back to lining his pockets again.

Somewhere, back in the mists of time, co-writers Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber must have flapped their gums in the fond hope of crafting a script; today, that whisper of hot air has swollen into a feature flick that rains down upon us a veritable torrent of inane plot.

A layabout movie -- not risibly bad, just relentlessly sub-par.

Certainly, this is meant to be a bittersweet tale of the ties that bind the generations, of the love-hate relationship between a demanding Daddy and his amiable offspring. But nothing really develops, nothing ever connects. [02 Mar 1984]

The madness of Madhouse simply eludes me. [16 Feb 1990]

Even at the abbreviated length of 70 minutes (less feature than featurette), material so maniacal wears very thin very fast. [5 Feb 1993]

If laughs are the currency of any comedy, then this one pays minimum wage and, worse, makes you work damn hard even for that pittance.

For the price of a ticket, and 100 minutes of your time, how many laughs are enough to qualify as just compensation? Will four or five do? Let's be generous and count five.

As for the locals, they speak like extras from "Fargo," although, on this go-round, that weird Swedish accent has somehow lost its power to amuse.

Characters already too wicked to be credible start doing stuff simply too stupid to be believed, with no help from a cast way too overmatched to be useful.

A crashing bore.

Far more than most action stars getting on in years, Bruce Willis has aged nicely into the role. Maybe it’s that shaved pate of his, a bullet-head that still looks primed for any chamber.

Pretty much what you'd expect -- just another haunted house that happens to float.

Writer/director Gus Van Sant, who's built his reputation on the romantic decadence of "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho," completely misses the poetry and the irony of the book. [20 May 1994]

[Cohen] can't quite decide whether to play the picture for high camp or pure adventure or just plain belly laughs. Predictably, he blasts away in all directions at once and hits precious little. [31 May 1996]

Valuable life lessons always come at a steep price, and this one is no exception. Sorry, but you'll have to shell out for The Divide and then suffer through its nearly two hours of bloody inanities. Weigh the balance, make your choice.

It’s just such a shining example of a dull studio comedy.

The pretty good stuff comes early, when Nic and Ron, weary of wasting women and children, suffer an attack of conscience and desert the Crusades.

Neither boring enough to qualify as pornography nor vital enough to generate a controversy.

But the best, most irrefutable reason why Sex and the City 2 deserves one-half a shining star. It’s worse than Sex and the City 1, and that alone is a remarkable achievement.

You might believe that a movie comedy requires no visual rhythm, and that entire scenes -- especially those big set-pieces -- benefit greatly from a shooting style devoid of imagination and unremittingly flat. If so, A Guy Thing is surely your thing. Enjoy.

[Pitof's] managed to create an entire digitalized city that has all the allure of an underground parking garage. And his action, it's cluttered; his editing, it's confused. The result: blandness butchered, hamburger chopped, kitty littered.

A 0-star Comedy that is nonetheless guaranteed to rake in multimillions.

For all its current political incorrectness, the original film at least attacked hypocrisy; this one practises it.

View from the Top never gets off the bottom -- comedies don't come much flatter.

As for Keitel, he pops up in a brief cameo as a housing contractor, with a dump-truck full of sand, the one that De Niro is standing right behind. The pair engage in a heated argument, as they once did so memorably those many years ago, and then the truck dumps that load exactly where you know it must. An esteemed actor gets buried but, what-the-fock, the franchise laughs on.

It's always rather sad to watch gifted performers stranded in a tepid thriller. You can see them, as professional pretenders, trying to believe that they're creating a character, but the lie is transparent -- all they're really doing is advancing a retarded plot.

Basic Instinct 2 is double trouble -- the femme is to die for, the film is to die from.

The same covey of kids assemble at a summer camp to meet their predictable fate. Once again, their thespian talents defy assessment, since most hang around just long enough to take off the limited clothes of the American teen-ager and take on the limited role of the bloody victim - both acts performed just once, always in that order. [04 May 1981]

In the case of When in Rome, oh to do what the Romans used to do: Toss the bloody thing to the lions.

A few early laughs scattered around a plot as thin as it is repetitious. There's talent in this picture, both before and behind the camera, but virtually none of it gets on the screen.

The whole mess turns nuttier by the second. A black comedy, you ask? I wish. There are plenty of laughs here, but nary a one is intentional.

Dragonfly has more plot than a figure-skating competition, and just about as much credibility.

There's nothing even mildly intriguing, or remotely galvanizing, about Showgirls.

When a movie ostensibly on a serious subject is so God-awful silly, is it impossible to be offended, or impossible not to be?

If physical appearance creates its own class system (in high school and beyond), then Qualls is perfect for this proselytizing role. He has that rarest of movie-star faces -- one that over comes the tyranny of beauty.

As cinematic flops go, nothing falls quite as hard as a failed black comedy.

Consequently, as star vehicles go, Ford Fairlane runs straight over the very guy it's meant to transport. Some will see that as the movie's greatest fault, others as its only virtue. Take your pick, and come out swinging. [13 Jul 1990, p.C1]

The movie pretty much blows.

And De Bont's effects are wildly over the top, devoid of the stylish cuts and intriguing angles that enriched the original. In fact, there's so little panache in his destructive action that it begins to seem like a weird act of self-destruction.

THERE'S NO excuse for Her Alibi. A hyphenated hybrid like this - romance- comedy-thriller - demands a lot of stirring; if nothing else (and there rarely is much else), it must at least be smooth, colorful and easy on the palate. Instead, the stuff here goes down like lumpy porridge on a grey morning.[3 Feb 1989]

The Love Guru is a comedy like the Leafs are a hockey team.

Here's the title: Couples Retreat. And here's the review: Couples, Retreat. Yep, just find the verb, treat it as a command, and vamoose, unless you harbour an abiding curiosity about how eternally long 100 minutes can feel.

God forgive me, but I worship the Bad Dialogue Fairy -- he gets me through these endless nights.

Judging by Friday the 13th, Sean S. Cunningham is not a great, not a good, not even a barely competent director. He has said that "a filmmaker must be part magician, part gypsy and part huckster." On the basis of this effort, Cunningham has conveniently overlooked the first two components and settled for a complete mastery of the third. [14 May 1980]

The Villain is itself an extended cartoon, a cartoon with live actors as its director Hal Needham redundantly describes it. The result: while we still guffaw once or twice, our suffering increases proportionately as we are made to sit through a full 80 minutes of numbing mindlessness. [25 July 1979]

Ho, ho, horrible.

Never one to shrink from the challenge of parodying the already parodic, along comes Marlon Wayans to do in A Haunted House what he once did in "Scary Movie." And do it much, much worse.

Frankly, about 20 minutes into this dud, I was rooting for the alien beasties -- their diagnosis seemed dead-on.

One Star (and only for quoting Knee-Chee).

A mundane sitcom with feature pretensions, the kind where the comic "situation" is simply a coat-rack for hanging a rag-tag assortment of inflated sight gags and telegraphed punch lines.

When animal passion turns into animal stupidity. [1 May 1990]

Remember that the director, the renowned Mike Mitchell, is the genius who helmed "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo," and be sufficiently generous to accept that such a high level of excellence is hard to sustain.

You will die at the hands of Zed's unborn son. Shucks, those wicked witches sure had a way of taking the fun out of life. Luckily for scheming kings, sadly for blameless movie-goers, such party-pooping prophecies are now mainly confined to formulaic flicks like The Beastmaster. [23 Aug 1982]

No less laughable is the ending, where Ritchie neatly reflects today's prevailing attitude -- that audiences can't be trusted to handle a hint of ambiguity, but can live happily with flat-out stupidity.

The plot makes the casting look inspired. More than inane, it's offensive. [14 Dec 1982]

Is this movie so god-awful bad that it's hilariously good? Can't be bothered deciding. Figure that's an answer in itself.

What's up with director John McTiernan? The man has got to get a career of his own -- sponging off the pale leavings of Norman Jewison just won't do.

Calls itself a movie. It has words and pictures like a movie, and will appear in theatres like a movie, and will damn sure charge admission like a movie. But, truth be told, that's pretty much where the resemblance stops.

The incomprehensible leads to the inexplicable which ends in the indecipherable.

Quite an artful dissembler. Despite all evidence to the contrary, this clunker has somehow managed to pose as an actual feature movie, the kind that charges full admission and gets hyped on TV and purports to amuse small children and ostensible adults.

The movie degenerates from the merely farcical to the appallingly tasteless...As the end draws mercifully near, one character proclaims: "This ship needs blood to survive." A film needs more than that. [22 May 1980]