Scott Tobias

Nothing this absurd should be this boring.

Imagine Paul Verhoeven’s “RoboCop” stripped of its politics, its wit, its humanity, and its craft, and that only gets halfway down the bottom of the barrel scraped by Officer Downe, a hyper-aggressive and thoroughly repugnant piece of comic-book juvenalia.

At some point in the production process, co-writer/director Greg McLean must have believed he was making John Cassavetes’ “Poltergeist,” but this odd fusion of psychodrama and supernatural hokum gets away from him.

As it stands, there are only enough comic ideas here, most of them bad ones, to reach 82 minutes; the other 11 are taken up by a postscript scene, a blooper, and closing credits that move, in the words of Scarlett O’Hara, as slow as molasses in January.

The action never stops once the first car bomb is triggered, but the second half of London Has Fallen takes place mostly in the dark, where nobody can see the budget.

Though Parker’s assured performance, along with the enchanting backdrop, eases the action toward harmless gentility, they’re hijacked by a plot that mimics the plate-spinning business of classic screwball, but moves at agonizing half-speed.

At a minimum, a parody should be funnier than the film it’s sending up, but Fifty Shades of Black, a quick-and-dirty riff on last year’s S&M romance “Fifty Shades of Grey,” falls a laugh or two short of even that low standard.

Monahan isn’t required to satisfy bloodlust or to pay off conventional plot points, even if his screenplay for “The Departed” displayed an abundant talent for doing so. But he assumes too much in believing that the audience will connect in any way with a sour, prickly narcissist who’s trapped in the gilded cage of wealth and fame.

Joseph winds up with an disorganized mishmash of visual gimmicks, empty exoticism, and soundbites worthy of “This is Spinal Tap.” Great music and some dynamic, up-close concert footage gives it the occasional life, but The Reflektor Tapes will appeal to Arcade Fire devotees only and even their patience might be tested.

Bruce McDonald’s Hellions is an unpleasant muddle of the visceral and the abstract.

United Passions leaves no historical-drama cliché unexploited: the voiceover narration, the jumbled Europudding accents, the expository dialogue, the hasty compression of major world events, the thickly applied old-age makeup, the not remotely seamless mix of re-creations and archival footage. It’s all there, in support of FIFA’s lies.

Virtually nothing happens in the film that enhances viewers’ understanding of the situation. Winterbottom and company merely survey the scene, kick around a few half-assed moments of atmosphere and suspense, shrug their shoulders, and pack it in for the night.

Gomez-Rejon has erected a gleaming shrine to adolescent narcissism.

The movie offers more of the same, only more: more T&A, more conspicuous consumption, more cameos, more Jeremy Piven yelling, and significantly more Mark Cuban than anyone outside the city of Dallas needs to see.

There are reasons why everyone on screen looks as unhappy as they do, but Llosa puts viewers in a place where they can’t understand precisely why, so the only choice is to sit there marinating in misery and boredom.

It’s only fitting that a series that began with the concept of linking the digestive tracts of three people would end by feasting on its own shit.

Sorting through the shards of the Ottoman Empire requires a historical complexity that eludes Crowe, who flattens the landscape into bromides on family and country, and the hard-won glories of being Russell Crowe. His on-screen persona could stand to be as modest as his filmmaking abilities.

With familiar faces like Arquette and Sevigny turning up in nothing roles, the film looks like a cheap, underproduced facsimile of the crime movies it’s trying to emulate. It goes down in a blaze of hoary.

Perhaps it was deliberate strategy on the part of McCann and his screenwriter, Anthony Di Pietro, to neutralize the politics of a mass killing and focus more on the psychic stress that triggered it. But even if that was the case, it doesn’t make the film any less crushingly banal.

The trouble with Black Or White is that it feels reverse-engineered, as if Binder wanted to deliver one big statement about race, and rigged an entire movie to make that possible.

Mortdecai’s farcical mechanics are actually well worked out, which is a credit to Koepp, an ace Hollywood screenwriter (Jurassic Park, 2002’s Spider-Man) who directed the fun late-summer sleeper Premium Rush two years ago. It’s just the jokes that are astonishingly unfunny.

Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.

There’s a good horror movie to be made about how the insularity of the Amish could stoke paranoia and fear—and obscure the truth and forbid outside perspective—under these circumstances, but The Devil’s Hand doesn’t have more than a casual interest in Amish rituals and traditions.

Dracula Untold boldly attempts to retell the Dracula origin story by sinking its teeth into Bram Stoker’s novel and draining it of all the passion, sensuality, and ambience that have seduced readers and moviegoers since the turn of the 20th century.

To borrow a phrase from Patton Oswalt’s bit on a particularly monstrous fast-food creation, the film is “a failure pile in a sadness bowl.”

The impression left by Harmontown is that the podcast and the tour are feeding the beast, worsening a pathology that casts him as the “mayor” of whatever stage he happens to be occupying at the moment.

Even allowing The Identical its premise, the reframing of the Elvis myth as a wholesome example of following God’s plan is not as inspirational as the film seems to believe. Rock fantasies are rarely this milquetoast.

All would be forgiven if director Brian A. Miller were the next John Woo, but the shootouts and car chases call to mind adjectives like “requisite” and “obligatory,” and the ready-made New Orleans ambience is nonexistent, probably for budgetary reasons.

While discipline and self-control certainly figure into Ladouceur’s teachings, there’s also a passion and drive that’s totally absent from Caviezel’s performance. It’s not that the film needs any more goosing—it’s broad and shameless even by inspirational-sports-movie standards—but its basic lack of plausibility starts with him.

Premature isn’t nearly as inventive and witty as Groundhog Day or Edge Of Tomorrow about finding fresh angles on repeating events, and it overestimates how much the audience might care about the self-improvement of a bland, clueless douchebag.

Brill’s point that there should be no such thing as a “walk of shame” is a good one, but he lacks the conviction to see it through honestly—or humorously.

Like sunrise over a steaming pile of garbage, A Haunted House 2 offers another sharp whiff of its predecessor, a Scary Movie-style spoof of the Paranormal Activity movies that makes up in volume what it lacks in invention.

Lucky Bastard mostly combines the worst of all worlds: the less-clever-than-it-thinks script of old-school porn, the piercing brightness and flatness of video production, an especially lackluster rendering of the played-out found-footage horror concept.

The tease of 50 gorgeous women fighting to the death has a classic grindhouse appeal, but Raze is strictly a “be careful what you wish for” proposition.

Free Birds feels like Hollywood brining small children for the blockbusters they’ll pay to see when they’re older. It’s littered with quips, but the film puts a premium on loud, effects-driven action that mistakes nonstop intensity for cartoony entertainment.

Afternoon Delight is one of those bad films that seem to drift further and further away from a recognizable reality the more we get to know it.

It couldn’t be a simpler, more workable premise for a good B-movie, but the amount of effort put into making it fast and edgy is inversely proportional to the scant thrills it yields.

Wiig’s new comedy sulks limply along with her, unable to bring the kind of energy that might complement her tendency to underplay every scene.

Nearly everything that happens in Olympus Has Fallen is ludicrous, yet because the fate of the president and the nation hangs in the balance, the crisis is treated with the gravitas of Paul Scofield at the West End.

An abysmal sequel that abandons the found-footage concept, along with the pockets of wit and originality that made its predecessor salvageable.

The cutaways to this cop-on-the-edge plot are jarring and lacking in conviction, and when the whole tortured mess comes together in a twist-filled third act, Safe Haven becomes a full-blown calamity.

Between the loaded conversations and metaphors, and the phony overlay of a children's fairy tale, The Playroom can't stop telegraphing themes and interpreting itself. There's nothing left for the audience to do.

Stevens wants to honor the living legends who have miraculously agreed to appear in his movie, but after spending a full hour treating their characters like cartoons, the about-face into heartfelt slop lacks the necessary gravitas.

The film is a bedroom farce without the farce, a fish-out-of-water comedy on sun-cracked lake-bed, a story of fatherly redemption that barely gets past the hair-mussing stage.

Red Dawn without the jingoism is like a pie without the filling - it collapses into splintered mush.

The specific problem with Part II is that a second act of huffery and puffery don't get it anywhere.

Gallagher briefly threatens to turn Smiley into something closer to the hallucinatory psychological horror of "Repulsion," but he retreats to the more conventional twists and jump-scares expected of bottom-of-the-barrel slasher films like this one. This film will not do for the Internet what "Psycho" did for showers - no more computers have to be smashed because of it.

The words "florid" and "inert" are not quite antonyms, but it would nonetheless seem impossible for those two adjectives to apply to the same thing. And yet here comes The Paperboy, a swamp noir so spectacularly incompetent that even the ripest pulp attractions are left to rot in the sun, flies buzzing lazily around them.

These are all legitimate concerns, which Navarro supports with testimony from economists, politicians, union leaders, and businesspeople, but they're undermined at every point by a sky-is-falling hysteria that registers as white noise. It's the documentary equivalent of a raving street-corner derelict.

Director Rob Whitehair doesn't do much to complicate what's essentially a promotional featurette for Wiede and Tucker's Wild Sentry organization, presenting the anti-wolf faction as rabid, irrational, and extreme. But he can't be blamed for wanting to stoke the drama a little: Without it, True Wolf would be a lesson in the care and feeding of an exotic pet.

There's an opportunity here for screenwriter Marek Posival and director Robert Lieberman to play up the squeamishness of upper-middle-class torturers who don't fit the profile, but they're too busy tending to horror-thriller clichés.

Writer-director Mary Harron, a supremely intelligent adaptor who did wonders with the screen version of Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho," simply doesn't have the chops to give this story the florid kick it needs.

The indie rom-com/sitcom L!fe Happens is a case study in how bad movies can turn an ordinary, relatable situation into a grotesque distortion with only a passing resemblance to the way actual human beings live and interact with each other.

No, the indie horror movie ATM is not about a psychotic automated teller that charges the steepest of convenience fees - your life! - but it isn't much smarter than that premise, either.

Given the creepiest rom-com premise this side of "Addicted To Love" - which at least had the wisdom to reflect on its camera-obscura voyeurism - director McG tries to turn This Means War into a cool pop confection along the lines of his Charlie's Angels movies. But pouring on the douchey hipness and charm only makes things worse.

As the plot unfolds, brick by brick, the structure starts to wobble until it finally collapses into unintentional comedy.

It will always be "too soon" for Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, which processes the immense grief of a city and a family through a conceit so nauseatingly precious that it's somehow both too literary and too sentimental, cloying yet aestheticized within an inch of its life.

What makes Jack And Jill worse than the average Sandler vehicle is Jill, who's been conceived as little more than a dude in drag, hold the jokes.

In many ways, the film is history repeating itself, as the same Weinstein brothers who famously dropped $10 million on "Happy, Texas" in 1999 have overpaid again for "Happy, Texas 2."

Not a second of it is convincing - or compelling - but then the film is about "utopia," a blandly idealized place unblemished by hardship, malice, sin, or errant golf strokes.

There are swords and sorcery, pirates and monsters, taxed bodices and taxing mythology. In other words, there's the bare minimum necessary to summon this dismal movie into existence.

The whole thing is rigged for crowd-pleasing payoffs - a bit about chocolate pie gets more mileage than a Prius - and those payoffs are about honoring white viewers for not being horrible racists. Kudos to them.

Produced in partnership with YouTube and distributed by National Geographic Films, the documentary Life in a Day is offspring with the worst genetic traits of both: narcissism on a global scale, speckled with pretty pictures. In a world without books or magazines, this is the movie people would watch in the waiting room at the dentist's office.

Monte Carlo finally resolves itself in a farcical climax that at least shows a little energy, but it isn't enough to overcome the discomfiting tensions and indifferent formula filmmaking that plagues nearly every scene.

A film so utterly lacking in conviction, it needs a 25-year-old Tom Cruise vehicle just to keep its spine straight.

The film is curiously sterile and lifeless, hardly the stuff of revolution. It feels more like an ideologically reversed "Tucker: The Man And His Dream," written and performed by robots.

This Arthur cravenly turns Susan into a monstrous status-seeker, making her less of a human being and thus much easier for Arthur to trample over in securing a meaningful adult relationship.

It's loud, relentless, and difficult to endure, capturing the experience of ground-level alien warfare with woeful verisimilitude.

The shame of it is, all this ridiculousness might have worked under surer hands. After all, farces are supposed to be a little silly, and the audience, for lack of a better phrase, can be trained to just go with it. The trick? Don't treat us like a bunch of Palmers.

A deplorable unofficial reworking of "Single White Female."

When the conclusion leaves the door open for still another sequel, it feels like an invitation to a living wake.

The best that could be said of Yogi Bear is that it doesn't diminish its source material.

Spacey has made a career out of projecting the smarmy elitism of the powerful, but Casino Jack is so painfully clunky that he gets dragged down along with it.

Disney has once again constructed a digital environment out of cutting-edge special effects, only this time, it isn't merely silly; it's as dry and talky as a PBS panel show.

It's neither remotely convincing as true-to-life drama or lurid and propulsive enough to work as exploitation. It's just bad.

Too often, Formula 51 fails to differentiate between gleeful excess and white noise.

It's hard to fathom what they intended for this forgettable group of lonelyhearts, other than to choreograph a whopping 14 happy endings at once--all of them forced, none of them earned.

With Cop Out, Smith works from a script other than his own for the first time--this one penned by siblings Mark and Robb Cullen--but his slack direction siphons the energy out of this tongue-in-cheek throwback to ’80s mismatched-buddy comedies.

Ritchie has said that it takes several viewings to fully understand what's going on in Revolver, but once will be enough for most to agree to take his word for it.

Walsh is just a dumb bully who can’t see more than one or two steps ahead. He’s doomed to generic slasher villainy, and the film thoughtlessly obliges.

Country Music Television's answer to "Elizabethtown."

Currently stopping by theaters briefly en route to DVD, the film tries to position Jameson as the next Linnea Quigley, the B-movie queen behind such enduring titles as "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers" and "Sorority Babes In The Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama."

Save for the diminished allure of drunk, naked hotties, there's nothing of worth in The Real Cancun.

Taken together, these stories are a symphony of inconsequentiality, drained of tension and purpose until all that remains is a vague sense of collective ennui.

Few of the scenes in The Perfect Game feel authentic, but the ones in Monterrey are especially lacking in flavor.

No doubt the list of talent involved in this remake sounded great, but the project hasn't been thought through as anything more than an arch exercise in style. And even in that trifling end, it fails utterly.

Brazenly ridiculous.

A tasteless, witless, mindlessly perfunctory bloodbath that has the discourtesy to take itself seriously. Pitting aliens against predators may be the height of frivolity, but God forbid anyone have fun with it.

In reviving the beloved Disney property, Robinson attempts to resuscitate the fast-motion shots and sub-Three Stooges physical comedy of classic Herbie, but the new model seems distantly related to the innocent, peppy little car of old.

It's hard to imagine a more ill-advised choice of source material.

On balance, more dignity is lost than gained.

Sports movies have a long, troubled history of well-meaning white paternalism, with poor black athletes finding success through white charity. But The Blind Side, based on Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book, finds a new low.

Debrauwer's characterization is as sharp and incisive as a butter knife.

The result is unfit for humankind.

Basically a prim, desexualized "Carrie," told from the prom date's perspective and featuring Peter Coyote in the Piper Laurie role.

It's now a straight-up crime and retribution flick, capped off by the dumbest wolf-feeding coda a 13-year-old ever dreamed up.

Offers a taming-of-the-shrew scenario so relentlessly bland and old-fashioned it makes "Dear John," the Sparks adaptation from two months ago, look like "Last Tango In Paris."

The emotions at play in Bella are no doubt heartfelt--and must have resonated with a few hundred people, anyway--but they're so cut-and-dried that the mawkish script virtually writes itself.