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.