Sean Axmaker

Never comes alive.

There's nothing sophisticated or inventive about it, but Cube has fun with his characters and first-time director Marcus Raboy drives the film with enough momentum and energy to make the gags flow together almost like a real story. That's enough to carry it through another Friday.

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

Fails to generate the elementary visceral thrills we've come to expect from science-fiction thrillers, let alone a compelling human drama.

The special effects display is so lacking in imagination it turns into so much noise, just a flashy distraction from the stiff, stock cliches of the by-the-numbers script.

I'd be tempted to call the whole thing cartoonish, but that would be insulting to the real thing.

Doom may be by the numbers, with a roll call of colorful types systematically exterminated while The Rock entertains with cartoonish expressions and reactions (the closest the film comes to personality).

All processed sugar and artificial flavor, right down to the sticky but tasteless happy ending.

This gory, ghoulishly funny horror goof is shameless fun in its own right.

It's about as convincing as any other Arnie musclefest, but has a little too much resonance with real world events and ultimately comes off as insultingly simplistic.

A preachy parable stylized with a touch of John Woo bullet ballet.

Ghost Town reworks "Ghost" as a romantic comedy with a miserable hero who sees dead people and is really annoyed by them.

See "Freaky Friday" for convincing cross-generational female bonding. Despite it's elegant style and uptown milieu, this film is a cheap imitation.

If there is a delicate story of forgiveness, friendship and family buried somewhere in Erica Beeney's script, Potelle and Rankin haven't managed to find it under the throes of empty rebellion and painless triumph.

The psychobabble silliness passed off as investigative insight here is laughable at best.

Has moments of inspiration, but the scattershot spoofing never achieves enough momentum to get this flight airborne.

Empowers its 14-year-olds and comes through with a Cinderella story sure to charm every girl who isn't part of the cool clique.

Kilner's light touch keeps the romantic pair dancing around their romance without tripping, but as the film reaches the inevitable happy ending, the steps look all too familiar.

The resulting hodgepodge has the feel of filmmaking by committee, the look of last-minute reshoots and the whiff of desperation. Not even Braff's cartoonish smirk is distracting enough to hide that.

Backseat satisfies itself with small observations and minor breakthroughs of self-awareness. In the scheme of their lives, this journey is just a speed bump, jolting them awake for a brief moment. The rest is up to them.

A slick, cynical, nasty piece of heist-film plotting that hides its more obvious logical gaps in techno-babble and distracting spectacles of wanton violence and big explosions.

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.

Isn't merely bad, it's utterly flavorless and the filmmakers are either too lazy or too cynical to even pretend there's a story behind Lawrence's 21st century homeboy shtick in 14th-century garb.

A dumb film with a great conceptual hook from a director who visualizes better than he dramatizes.

The ironies and contradictions that give the first half a dark humor give way to gravity and respect as soldiers are killed (off camera).

Entertaining in a trashy sort of way.

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.

Whether or not Garden Party is an accurate portrait of the shadow L.A. culture where the young, pretty and desperate can find quick rent money, this low-budget production never engages with its characters or stories enough to make you care either way.

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.

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

The result is a great-looking movie with an awkward balance of pulp noir and campy self-awareness.

A stiff of a supernatural comedy.

Ultimately this soppy Pacifier sucks.

Don't watch this film unless you have a high tolerance and an undemanding appreciation for penis jokes and humor based more on a capacity to disgust than to surprise.

Washington's fire and righteous anger can only do so much, and the token grit amounts to a few grains of sand in the sentimental machinery.

Director Casey La Scala directs with enough energy to carry the odyssey over the next ramp, but for all the eagerness of the performances, the conviction is strictly prepackaged.

Ashton Kutcher wants to be taken seriously so badly it hurts. So does this metaphysical mess of a movie, a pseudo time-travel drama so complicated it takes more than half an hour just to establish the gimmick. And a gimmick it is.

Deutch never raises the film beyond its paint-by-numbers blueprint.

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.

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

This larger-than-life cartoon of a trained dog has more character than the two-legged co-stars.

Between Stallone's soap opera of a script and Renny Harlin's speed-obsessed visuals, we're never really shown much more than fast cars and obsessed drivers.

Prinze and Forlani coast on charisma alone, but even their charms can't coax magic from the prosaic dialogue and romantic clichés that clog this listless comedy.

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

Like shave ice without the topping, this cinematic snow cone is as innocuous as it is flavorless.

I can imagine the pitch meeting: "It's 'Kramer vs. Kramer' meets 'Forrest Gump.' No, wait, 'Rainman' has a baby!"

This half-baked production sat on Miramax's shelf for a couple of years. It's no more done now than then, merely more stale.

Beck wants to dazzle the audience. I'd settle for a story.

Though a hypnotically beautiful film, it's dramatically listless and dull, and completely lacking in passion.

Plays like a feature-length sitcom with gay double entendres.

As stiff and slogging as animated films come.

The script is soggy and sloppy and Waters is no master of suspense, but he does have a pair of engaging stars flirting in a world of chic New York glamour.

Levant turns up the slapstick, doubletakes, and epic fart jokes to a tortured extreme.

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

Sour slapstick assault with a tin heart and counterfeit sentimentality.

While it displays precious little originality or ingenuity, A Guy Thing is less graceless than most of its ilk and benefits from a likable cast.

Low octane comedy running on fumes.

The results are shapeless, excessively lurid and often unpleasant, with Argento shamelessly vamping the white-trash junkie mother and truck-stop hooker. She apparently forgot whose story she was telling.

It's recidivist Murphy: bad-skit comedy populated by caricatures in search of a movie.

Upbeat but generic songs (one performed by Little Richard) and jazz lines add a little energy but the film feels less like a feature than an expensive ad for the upcoming video.

In a summer of cardboard figures in splashy spectacles, that makes for a refreshing change, an intriguing, entertaining and altogether sweetly mystifying misfire. In other words, another quintessentially Alan Rudolph picture.

It's more thrill ride than movie and Wong plays it that way: no sentiment, no complications and no pesky story to get in the way of an arsenal of flashy special effects.

Bland and boring.

A competent concoction of familiar ingredients, smothered with gothic mood and served up with a generous helping of teenagers: skewered, slashed and stabbed.

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.

Cohen drives the film at a galloping pace, but it's not fast enough to outrun its absurdity.

A girlie romantic comedy with tired slapstick pranks but not an ounce of self-respect or intelligence.

Director Jesse Vaughan keeps the ball in play through the aw-shucks lessons in humility and generosity, but the teamwork is shoddy, the plays lack surprise and, finally, Juwanna Mann misses more than it hits.

It's hard to believe that five different writers took credit for this feeble story and script. Who says failure is an orphan?

Not that there are any actual jokes to be had. The film simply jumps to the punch lines, a non-stop barrage of crude dialogue and vulgar sight gags that passes as humor among adolescent boys. Who exactly is the audience for this R-rated film? The terminally immature?

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

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

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.

Call this one "Die Hard" on Alcatraz, and this time the "cuckoo crazy" maverick has got the homeboys on his side.

The film has good design, effective animation and generic if endurable songs, but Sandler wants to slam his sentiment and wallow in it too, and he compromises with the worst of both worlds.

The film is a shapeless mess and about as convincing as a cartoon, the usual mix of slapstick, doofus humor and raunchy sex jokes lacking even the bite or attitude to make it adventurous.

Inspired, inventive and funnier than it has a right to be, Larry Blamire's loopy spoof of 1950s bargain-basement sci-fi and horror knock-offs gets it right where so many well-meaning efforts go wrong.

A one-joke, one-note turkey.

A harried, screechy film that goes nowhere at a breakneck pace, full of sound and furious slapstick overkill but devoid of wit.

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.

Afraid to pitch into farce, yet only half-hearted in its spy mechanics, All the Queen's Men is finally just one long drag.

The film is inoffensive, and Baldwin is fun and engaging.

It's so sloppy that the flashback montage includes clips from scenes that were cut from the film!

Cut down to a frantic 88 minutes, you wonder if all the human moments were trimmed away to get to this abstract, humorless exercise in empty flourish.

This is pseudo-cynical comedy, however, not social satire. All the sharp corners are smoothed over and what's left is little more than a big screen sitcom.

At its best, Company Man hums from one piece to the next, a harmless, good-natured, often silly spoof with a few cutting barbs and a comic showman's love of the well-executed gag.

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.

For all the hot air expended, this film ends up all smoke and no heat.

Glib, sense-numbing action fantasy.

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

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.

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.

Confidently directed and elegantly designed, this smart drama is sensitive, sympathetic and refreshingly free of glib moralizing.

The roll call of perversions and adolescent sex gags are more creepy than kooky and the sudden shift to triumphant romantic sincerity at the climax rings as false as this film's sappy (sorry, happy) ending.

Feels like nothing less than Dana Carvey's desperate bid for his own "Austin Powers"-like franchise, but with a harmless humor far less crude. Carvey favors whoopee cushion punch lines to toilet gags and references to big butts over sexual double-entendres.

It should have warned us that logic was also hitting hard times.

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