Robbie Collin

As last dances go, it’s the Macarena in film form.

If you don’t actually want to make a film out of a Roald Dahl book, this critic’s advice is: don’t.

The film is so myopically gripped by the idea of Marvel as endlessly fascinating corporate soap opera that in five years time, you wonder if it will make any sense at all.

The amatory mechanisms here are so basic they make 1970’s Love Story look like Wuthering Heights, but at least Love Story had the courage to wring every last drop of pathos from its tragic-romance premise.

This series' sixth film has a daft plot, groans with lousy action and makes the poor old dinosaurs humiliatingly surplus to requirements.

Tom Gormican, the writer and director, mostly uses overlapping dialogue in place of actual jokes, although occasionally he stretches to toilet humour.

As dismal to contemplate as it is persistently horrendous to even look at, there aren’t enough Patrick Stewart-voiced emojis in the world to express what an ugly, artless exercise this is.

The result is cinema you don’t watch so much as absent-mindedly scroll through, wondering when an idea or an image worth clicking on will finally show up.

As filmmaking, it’s as mindless as Hollywood’s worst.

All in all, it’s a new low in a mini-franchise comprised almost entirely of new lows: Venom, Morbius, and now this.

In cinematic confession, no number of Hail Marys could make amends for this.

American Assassin seems to have a certain target audience in mind, and it’s probably not one you’d want to be considered a part of.

You can sense what Dahan’s aiming at: by introducing the spectre of Hitch early on, he lays out Grace’s existence as a kind of lived-in Hitchcock thriller... But the acting is so heightened, and the script so thoroughly awful, that Dahan’s idea – his big and seemingly only one – can’t begin to stick.

The action is slapstick-driven, yet the set-pieces are all so transparently bogus – with fourth-rate CGI and actors’ digital doubles flopping about the place like haunted marionettes – that they play as insulting rather than outrageous.

Connoisseurs of the accidentally ludicrous will find much to laugh at here.... But scares and intrigue are both in miserably short supply.

The film never tries to do anything other than look good, and is hellishly ugly even so.

A psychotically unfunny art-heist romp.

Seventh Son would hardly be the first film to use "strong female characters" as a means of waving its misogyny under the radar, but it’s seldom carried off as depressingly as this.

A shambolic film populated by some of the most aggressively charmless characters ever seen in a blockbuster.

A second instalment of the Oz origin movie is bloated and boring despite new songs for both Elphaba and Glinda.

Disasters: well, they said it. The new film from Dennis Dugan is a frighteningly inept stab at a romantic comedy in the Nancy Meyers style.

No child deserves to be subjected to this kind of blaringly witless branding bombardment; as for adults, I felt like I was being beaten around the head with the Argos catalogue.

As a motor-mouthing smart-ass, the 58-year-old Pitt is badly miscast – every detail here seems tailored to Ryan Reynolds, director David Leitch’s Deadpool collaborator – while the film's bulging cast and bloated running time recalls those all-star capers of the 1960s: imagine It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World crossed with a migraine. For the sake of all that’s holy, take the bus.

So, what happens in Grown Ups 2? Almost absolutely nothing.

How can it be possible that nine years have passed since the previous instalment, yet every facet of this one feels so woefully first-draft? Expend4bles: wh4t a lo4d of cr4p.

While the del Toro Hellboys were postmodern Frankenstein fables, shining with pathos, fun and fairy-tale allure, this unsolicited reboot is ugly, obnoxious and yowlingly witless, with nothing to say for itself that doesn’t start with the letter F.

There is a noxious undead pong emanating from this latest entry in the 1980s franchise, which is now being necromantically sustained through force of sheer commercial desperation, and nothing else.

If every last joke in it wasn’t built on the premise that anyone who isn’t a straight, white, able-bodied, middle-class male isn’t intrinsically laughable, it might have made for lively comedy.