Shawn Levy

Ugly, dull, bloodless, dumb, and phony to its core.

The comic moments are fewer, flatter and far, far less welcome.

It's as sullying and disheartening an experience as the movies can offer .

The film manages the rare trick of improving as it unrolls from the utterly putrid to the barely tolerable. And, friends, I wish to say that sometimes that is as good as you can hope for in this racket.

The film drags and lingers and goes more or less nowhere, imitating its protagonists' lives so exactly that you want to give them both a good smack.

You're likelier to shrink in astonished horror from it than laugh.

A new political thriller, has an ending so egregiously stupid that not to reveal it would be a disservice to moviegoers.

A stultifying bore.

An ugly and insipid film.

A terrible, terrible movie. Its creators have a swell idea at the core, a wonderful leading lady, and several stalwart comic players in support, and they make of all of that a picture with the wit of an armpit fart, the verve of a boxwood shrub, and the appeal of a long night in an ER waiting room.

The trouble is that it's so lead-footed and delighted with itself even as bit after bit sinks like a lead weight.

It's a terrible picture: ugly and illogical and clumsily staged and peppered with crude, witless humor.

In a way, it's perfect: You can't imagine anyone seeing this mess and not feeling lesser for the experience.

While there are some glittery bits in it, the film is frustrating, cluttered, inelegant and garish.

Best laugh at the movies all autumn.

Romeo Is Bleeding has a core of such mean smugness that the genuine shock is that the picture got made at all. It isn't so much that the film is violent, misogynistic and hateful. It isn't even that it so often lapses into senselessness and laughable pretense. It's that a certain competence has been deployed in the service of such degrading and juvenile material, that a group of actors and filmmakers and financial backers all said ``yes'' to something that ought never to have happened. [4 Feb 1994, p.15]

A vile, stupid and ugly movie lacking utterly in pep, thrills, humor, finesse or morals, a dissipating waste of time, money and human resources.

A movie of such rank stupidity and appalling taste.

It adds up to a truly taxing couple of hours: ham acting, visual noise, aural torture, elementary plotting and unconvincing emotions.

Washington can't save a picture that spends so much time worrying about a heart that it loses its head.

It's dull and crude and silly and without a lick of quality.

A carnival of stupid coincidences, paper-thin characterizations, and inept staging, lighting and montage.

The loudest, dumbest, slowest, least entertaining and most annoying by a very comfortable margin.

It's written almost without wit or romance, it's populated by bland actors, and it's photographed as if through a Jell-O mold. If this is adolescence, then senility can't come soon enough. [29 Jan 1999]

Would somebody please pull the plug on James Bond? It's not that Tomorrow Never Dies is inconceivably bad. What with dashing Pierce Brosnan cavorting as 007, nifty Michelle Yeoh playing chop-socky on bad guys' heads, and a nearly-sentient BMW in Bond's bag of tricks, it's got at least as much going for it as, oh, a good Steven Seagal film. [19 Dec 1997, p.19]

A limp and annoying picture.

Such a staggering, start-to-finish disaster that you don't know how to begin detailing its outrages and failings.

Goes on too long and doesn't have much to say.

An ugly, stupid movie it turned out to be. Incoherent, arbitrary, hyperactive and dark enough to make you fear you've gone blind.

A movie so lame that Keanu Reeves lends it gravity with his mere presence.

A seedy little movie with little in the way of theme, purpose, energy or wit, 'R Xmas is the latest slice-of-death drama from that earnest maestro of grub, Abel Ferrara.

A ghastly, unappealing mess that lacks a single absorbing character, engaging story line or entertaining snippet of dialogue.

A witless, listless muck-up that sends you reeling from the theater with thoughts of suicide instead of a chipper grin.

The animation is dull, the thought is fuzzy, the storytelling is vague and the music just plain stinks. It's not "National Velvet," it's sure not "The Black Stallion," it's not even "Dances With Wolves."

It's a terrible movie, ugly to look at, tediously drawn out, unfunny in every cell and fiber of its being.

Handsomely photographed, artfully edited and acted with skill and conviction. It is also so stupid that you expect to see strings of drool dripping from the corner of the screen.

It's deeply ordinary, depressingly shabby stuff.

The Baxter is so ineptly conceived, staged, written and played that you suspect it's part of a psychology experiment to see if people will laugh at anything.

A resolutely awful film, it makes you want to swear off sex, comedy, Rupert Everett movies, flowers, yoga, children, roast beef -- many of the best things in life, in fact.

Seeing Hitman isn't like playing a video game or even like watching someone else play a video game. It's like watching someone stupid play a bad video game.

Bang-bang, kiss-kiss, yawn-yawn. While dull death metal churns on the soundtrack, Johnson engages in one big brawl after another.

It's awful. Awful. That's all. Keep walking. For the love of all that's holy. Keep. Walking.

A dreary, overlong and occasionally laughable classical epic about the great Macedonian world conqueror, it's guilty of a sin that no Stone film has ever committed: It's boring.

It's simply an awful, awful film.

While his star, Jude Law, is infectiously watchable, Shyer's version of the material is tone deaf and splotchy.

Better luck trying to find out what truly happened to the real Earhart than trying to diagnose all that's wrong with this hapless film.

This isn't an ordinary film built on a remarkable performance; it's a poor one with a gem at its core. Penn can elevate it to mediocrity, but he cannot make it fly.

So shapeless, pointless and witless a film that it can be explained only by surmising that the people who made it were bombed at the time.

Does nothing right and, blessedly, vanishes swiftly like the aroma of a nasty belch.

A contrived and sentimental melodrama, the film takes a promising premise and crushes it with mind-numbing repetition, sophomoric conveniences, plastic acting and the worst score, perhaps, ever heard.

A forehead-poundingly bad picture.

Hampered from the start by the numbingly formulaic additions by screenwriter James DeMonaco ("The Negotiator"). Toss in needlessly fussy visuals and a climax that is hilariously out of whack, and you've got an excellent excuse to stay home and watch the original.

Deeply phony, strangely static, disengaged, flaccid and, quite often, silly, it’s a film that tries to bully you into emotions with flourishes of music, contorted camera angles, screams of special effects, smears of gore, and earnest close-ups of its woefully miscast star.

Dick works best as a catalog of style: It's the story and the acting that are the window dressing.

Like his (Carrey) early work, it's not a particularly good film -- insipidly staged, inanely plotted, too weak to withstand the weight of any inquiries into logic or continuity -- but Carrey's energetic mugging, particularly early on, makes it relatively painless.

Pretty much the worst recent example of a genre.

To be fair, there are moments when the film seems better than, finally, it is.

A by-the-numbers recipe that ought to have shot off at least a few sparks, is as drab as the inmates' prison blues.

Witless, tasteless, toothless, pointless, garish, repetitive, obvious, and painfully dull, Pirate Radio is that exceedingly rare film that never, but never puts a foot right.

Miscast, clumsily staged and ideologically wobbly.

Few movies feel quite so perfunctory or needless or pointless as this one.

Not much in The Man From Elysian Fields resembles life on Earth, but there are a few moments with Jagger that feel desperate and human -- stuff from another movie entirely, in other words.

What's left is a husk with all the superficial features of a Scream movie and none of the heart, brains, guts or laughs.

A movie built on one joke -- an old one -- and an incoherent, even idiotic plot.

All in all, it's hard to dispute that House of D declares its own worth on arrival.

If the new I-wanna-be-a-stewardess picture View From the Top were an airplane, it would blow up on takeoff. If it were an airline meal, it would infect you with E. coli. If it were a parachute, it would be riddled with holes.