Russell Smith

What is love? Haddaway asks in the omnipresent soundtrack song. Not this time-wasting bilge, that's for sure.

These thugs, needless to say, are pulverized as effortlessly as so many Easter chicks. This is a problem I've always had with Seagal's martial arts sequences; there's seldom a nanosecond of suspense, and the fight choreography has all the sophistication of Seventies drive-in fare such as Billy Jack and Walking Tall.

Near-unwatchable romantic melodrama.

What I can't accept, however, is talents such as Reno, Garcia, Tomlin, and Molina wasting away in a movie like this. As punishment for their complete lack of artistic integrity, all four of them should be forced to sit in a room for all eternity watching The Pink Panther 2 over and over.

There's little to recommend this movie, which is part and parcel with Marshall's schlock-dominated body of work.

Definitive modern cinematic eye-candy with all the connotations of empty calories that term implies.

In context, it's utterly, dismayingly typical.

Mainly offers fodder for tweens who fantasize about glamorous Los Angeles lifestyles where everyone is skinny, rich, and on Prozac. It's a film where gays and minorities not only fit into stereotypes, but embrace them.

Most folks are just plain bored -- and I mean cross-eyed, wall-climbing, deep-down-to-the-molecular-level bored -- with this ubiquitous Endearing Wiseguys school of movie comedy.

The unnecessary nastiness, even sadism, of much of the violence also bears mentioning if you're expecting more of the benignly cartoonish silliness of Cube's lone directing effort, "The Players Club."

Now I realize my confessed appreciation for Kids will thoroughly bugger my credibility in describing Gummo with phrases like “appalling,” “gratuitously cruel,” and “exploitative,” but the unmitigated repulsiveness of this film pretty much rules out all subtler options.

Steel's target audience of 12-year-old boys would be better off staying home and busying themselves at traditional, character-enriching activities: sniping at family pets with BB guns, playing Nintendo, and masturbating.

This is one that, like a 1am rerun of a late-season Cavs-Grizzlies matchup, deserves to play out in darkness and obscurity.

Next time, Pooh, why not do the work it takes and give your drowsy-eyed meal tickets some of the (as it were) good shit?

A sketchy, half-baked, stylistically inconsistent movie that scarcely even pretends to care whether it makes sense or not.

Most of the actors seem to have been issued one facial expression at the beginning of the film, along with pain-of-death instructions not to change it under any circumstance.

No originality, no memorable characters, no comic timing, and no good jokes equal no fun for the audience.

And next time around... show the courage of your lowbrow convictions and get back to the gonzo, unapologetically senseless mayhem that made this saga so much fun in the beginning.

This remake of Fred Zinnemann's well-regarded Day of the Jackal (1973) not only fails to match the modest entertainment value of Frederick Forsyth's workmanlike source novel, but actually moves into late contention for the title of 1997's most tedious movie.