Sean Axmaker

While too bland and stupid to be offensive, Never Back Down spouts a hollow message of nonviolence while celebrating the brutal satisfaction of beating the crap out of someone.

Tired and glib, it tries to milk humor from the sniping, sass and simple disrespect of its unpleasant traveling companions.

Ultimately this soppy Pacifier sucks.

It's a shrill cacophony of puerile clichés about men and women and sex, delivered in adrenaline-driven harangues and arrogant lectures. When the stage clears, all that's left is the unpleasant odor of all that hot air.

Not faithful enough to be an adaptation, too misguided to be considered an interpretation, and not funny enough to be a parody, this film would do well not to advertise its inspiration.

No style, no irony and no smarts, just a vicious streak that lasts 90 minutes.

Stephen Brill's flat-footed script begins as an idiot comedy with the gross-out gags of a Farrelly brothers film.

All that's left are cute animals with animated mouths spitting out fitfully inspired one liners, sophomoric sexual innuendo and enough poop gags to last a lifetime.

Coupled with the flavorless dialogue of the inane script and a leading man who registers all the glow of a black hole, there's nothing to anchor this mindless mess of a film.

This isn't a movie, it's a marketing ploy. Would you like a plush Garfield toy with that popcorn?

A potentially interesting idea deflated by the absurd proclamations of an arch screenplay and smothered under the ponderous gravity of M. Night Shyamalan's dreary direction.

The utter lack of tension or suspense is as dumbfounding as Hunt's blender approach to editing, which purees action scenes into incoherent mashes of image confetti.

The most insipidly innocuous film ever made about facing mortality and living it up before passing away, The Bucket List has as much poetry and poise as its clumsy, clunky title.

Yet another raunchy, gross-out farce, this one about smart-alecky city boys who have wacky adventures while exposing themselves in -- I mean to -- the great outdoors.

The slapdash comic flailing of screenwriter and TV scribe-turned-director Ed Decter is only compounded by a script so disconnected you have to wonder if pages were lost on the way to the set.

It's phony and forced, but mostly it's just silly. If there was once a satirical edge to this thriller, it's been programmed right out.

There is no stylistic thrill to this blunt object of a callous action film. It's content to bludgeon the audience into numb resignation.

It's bad enough that the lazy script substitutes goofy situations for actual gags, much of which falls flat under Rob Pritts' plodding direction, but Corky Romano finally sours in cynicism and hypocrisy.

Glib, sense-numbing action fantasy.

A sloppy, indifferent action movie with a sadistic edge and a sour hypocrisy.

Not just a bad film, Hannibal Rising is downright dull, which is a far worse crime.

The humorless and self-important execution attempts an operatic scale but only succeeds in sinking the remnants of the story's integrity. By the time it makes landfall, this incoherent production has blown itself out.

The disingenuous attempt to give the tawdry story some kind of social import only makes the tinny caricatures more insincere, while his erotic display of 15-year-old girls isn't a satire of a sexualized culture, it's just dirty.

There is no histrionic excess or crackpot camp, only hoary sentiment, the puppy-dog cuteness of the mentally handicapped, and the proposition that the "cure" for lesbianism is one good man brave enough to get in touch with his inner cow.

There's no slow descent into ruthless warfare and we get neither the giddy charge of their bad behavior, nor the guilty sting of complicity in their ruthless desire. All that's left is an idea still in search of a script.

Less offensive than embarrassing, at least for the chagrined performers.

The script drowns out its ideas with arch melodramatic devices and ridiculous twists while Babbitt smothers even the daylight scenes in an oppressive gloom.

Redfield's fans will rejoice, if only to see the beloved novel illustrated on the screen, no matter how tediously. The rest of us probably should stay away.