Stephen Hunter

In all it wastes time, talent -- not least of all Reynolds's -- and money on an obscure mission. [30 Jul 1997, p.C02]

The only impressive thing about it is the monotony and thoroughness with which it replicates cliches from older, better movies and hammers them into pop alloy to an up-with-me beat beat beat of its musical score.

Put another movie on the barbie, mate; maybe it'll be better.

The director, Patricia Rozema, has a rare talent: She gets third-rate performances out of first-rate performers with almost startling efficiency. All are bland, some hardly exist at all, and as performance, the whole thing seems a waste.

There's some cool sword-fighting. But still, it's junk.

So rancid is Brooks's fury that it's clouded his judgment, so that each of his main characters is a stereotype of the most broad-brush, malodorous nature.

The cast is too good for the script and the script is too good for the director and the director is too good for the horny dog jokes.

The movie is very loud. It is pointlessly loud, arbitrarily loud, assaultively loud.

It's a movie with the exciting parts cut out.

Perhaps as a publishing phenomenon the concept works, but on-screen it's pretty dull, with good actors in bad roles and bad special effects.

So tame and limp, it may actually give mothers-in-law a good name.

Vaughn's con-man jive doesn't get much play in this one; he spends most of his time as a bitter creep, and the writing (by Dan Fogelman) isn't sharp enough to make the hipster-at-the-North-Pole theme pay off in any meaningful way.

Directed by Vincent ("A Map of the Human Heart") Ward, who is either a genius or a crackpot, and derived from a long-ago novel by Richard Matheson, the film is overproduced and underpopulated, with either characters or ideas.

The movie is so disturbing that it seems nearly blasphemous. I wouldn't wish it on an anthrax spore. After all, anthrax has feelings, too.

You can't make an epic about a mouse.

Where is the suspense part? There is no suspense part. Suspense demands clarity of motive and action, and this screenplay never provides it.

the movie comes on as a novelty item, meaning it's so full of disparate parts and so unable to approach coherence, it just sits there and burns out.

It's too bloody to be funny and too silly to be dramatic and too self-indulgent to be anything other than what it is, one more bad movie.

The movie, as its title suggests, means to be one of those Tarantino-esque in-your-face jobs, amusing on the audacity of its outrageousness. Here's how "outrageous" it is: Zzzzzz-zzzz.

It's part travelogue in Hell, part ineffectual weepie.

The new Dutch film Black Book manages to turn World War II into a large piece of cheese. A lurid, pulpy, slightly perverse potboiler, the movie suffers mainly from its utter lack of seriousness.

I'll tell you what's gone in 60 seconds, all right: my attention.

There's nothing wrong with Uptown Girls that not seeing it won't fix.

The first and possibly the last Will Ferrell star vehicle. It's a clumsy, tedious ride that wears out its welcome as it wears out the seat of your pants and the circulation in your lower limbs.

In the end, Gerry is beyond the simple question of pleasure. Seeing it may be no fun at all, but then discomfort is part of the price one pays in learning.

Instead of gold-medal-winning, last-minute heroics, the movie weirdly becomes about the scandal of arbitrary gymnastics judges. Is it a movie or an episode of "Real Sports"? It veers into fresh territory but not dramatically satisfying territory.

As long as it stayed mainstream dirty it was okay, but when it got into perversions the American Psychiatric Society hasn't even named yet, it left me behind.

Friends, Washingtonians, countrymen, I come not to praise Gladiator but to bury it.

I literally did not count a single laugh in the whole aimless schlep, except for the hucksters who made it, on their way to the bank.

It seems such a waste to go onto the actual streets of Lower Manhattan and shoot a movie this stupid. Think of the money, the logistics, the interruptions in the city's life -- all that trouble for what? For this? For shame.

Just another thriller, utterly disposable.

It's like a summer stock "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," with the proviso that occasionally a giant snaggle-tooth monster slobbers onstage and eats George or Martha.

It continually crashes and burns on its own banality.

It's not really a movie. I suppose it's what could be called a recorded behavior.

Between bad hair and tonal irregularity, the movie doesn't give you much to like.

You are likely to encounter more surprises on the way to the bathroom each morning than you do in this film.

For the most part, Daredevil doesn't take a single dare; it travels the road much trod, even if it's through the midtown air.

All in all, it's like a bachelor's apartment: a complete mess.

Now and then sputters to comic life but more usually wheezes along.

A vicious anti-Catholic diatribe disguised as an audition tape for MTV.

Illustrates the law of returning diminishments.

It orders you to love it. It demands love, which is the best way not to get it.

The movie, directed (and written) by Zach Helm in grotesquely bright colors, means to approach the creepy wonder of Roald Dahl but gets only the creepy part right.

The comedy is strained to the point of lameness, most of it exaggerated clumsiness, stupidity or inappropriateness.

Let's blame it on poor Robin Williams, who tries so desperately to be likable, whimsical, lovable, smart and funny all at once that he just wears you out. Blame it also on the behind-the-scenes engineers at Disney who think that effects are more important than story and character.

The movie falls from grace to clunkiness and continues its herky-jerky, way-unfunny trek around the amusement park. Who needs it?

Not merely Pacino's over-mannered, near-histrionic performance, but the movie itself could be characterized as busy, busy, busy. It's so full of plot twists and revelations and exploding sports cars that its very perkiness comes to seem comic.

It never makes much sense.

This is another unhelpful screed, uncontaminated by sense or perspective, that preaches loudly to the choir.

He still sees dead people, only now they're the best thing in the movie.

A few minutes of inspired lunacy aside, The Yes Men is largely a case of the same old preachers preaching to the same old choir.

Give Woody Allen credit for ambition. Failing at one movie wasn't enough. Nearly anyone can do that; it happens all the time. He's chosen to fail at two simultaneously.

It's such a great story, you have to ask two questions: Why didn't they make this movie before? And why did they make it this way?

Big, dull and empty -- nobody associated with this production appears to have thought hard about storytelling.

Meant to be a sleek, dark, disturbing David Cronenberg-style thriller, Olivier Assayas's film is just an annoying concoction.

There's not enough story in it to fill a shoebox.

It's pretty appalling, and it's boring.

It grinds on and on without mercy. You're in the cross hairs. There is no escape. Where is that Secret Service when you need it?

It never makes you laugh that hard. Not even close. And so the thing becomes a bloody assault on the senses that commingles atrocity with tedium.

Big Fish stinks from the head.

The problem is that director Peter Berg, aided and abetted by Smith and Theron and third banana Jason Bateman, seem to have made it literally, not realizing its out-of-whack tonalities and grotesque plot twists were meant to be played for laughs.

Utterly shatters the illusion with a trite plot, banal dialogue, clunky sentimentality and, worst of all, a sort of narrative arbitrariness.

Never manages to make its characters anything other than cartoons.

This feels like a cramped, TV-style retelling, with small groups of people, no special effects, in some ways almost cheesy.

A whodunit so bafflingly constructed that you can't even figure out what it is, so the whodun part is superfluous.

Like every other second of more than 10,000 seconds in Alexander, it doesn't engage in the least.

The movie is loud, dark, bumpy and not even a little fun. You emerge into daylight bruised and battered, suffering a case of movie abuse.

The story the film tells ruins the movie.

Ultimately undone by its sheer busyness. The screenwriters never get the story to settle down, and it becomes a case of one damn thing after another.

Duvall is a great actor in the homestretch of a great career; it's hard to hold this trifle against him, and certainly nobody will.

Everything in it is a cliche including the end.

Of the many comic book superhero movies, this is by far the lamest, the loudest, the longest. Good Lord, what an epic sit. My rear end deserves a medal...I wish I could say it wasn't so, but for most of us, this "X" marks a splat.

The baseball half of the story just slightly works. ... Nothing in [the other] half of the film works.

There are many ways to define the shrieking awfulness of The Family Stone, from the general lack of wit to the cheap exploitation of cancer to its casual cruelty, but it's writer-director Thomas Bezucha's casting that really goes awry.

A nasty bit of counter-programming, Wolf Creek is for people sickened by the sentimental excesses of the day and the holiday season and want to hide from them in mayhem, slaughter, torture and degradation.

The film has no discipline, but that's okay because it has no suspense, either.

This gives nobody, least of all me, any pleasure, but a truth must be faced: Scoop is the worst movie Woody Allen has ever made.

Like so many technological marvels, at the human level it's not only merely dead, it's really most sincerely dead.

The movie, alas, is shackled somewhat by Waugh's original, pedestrian plot, which is too full of discrete incidents and slow to form an overarching story.

The movie's fundamental problem is that Cusack's character isn't very interesting.

What Kalin fails to provide in the slightest degree is energy. The movie just sloshes along in a heavy, slightly overdone way.

It just never began to work for me, and the sub story behind the ghost story is far more interesting than the ghost story in front of the sub story.

The movie has the sense of being embalmed, or pickled. With its stilted dialogue not quite kitschy enough to be funny and not quite authentic enough to be realistic, the whole movie feels as if it's taking place in formaldehyde.

Mad Max just sails off into nonsense.

The movie never transcended its elaborate production work to achieve an independent reality.

It's just silly, loud and goofy. The dragon needed a bigger part and the two stars smaller ones.

Hanks is great; the movie isn't.

Each plot twist trumps its predecessor into ludicrousness.

They made a movie without one basic ingredient: the story.

Fast and furious, shallow, empty, casually racist, merry, jaunty, silly and utterly weightless.

It's like a music video of Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" filmed in the Chevy Chase Pottery Barn.

It's kind of a ghastly hoot, and while I suppose it does no harm, it also contributes nothing. It's a guilty unpleasantness.

Thankfully, after its terrific start, Don't Say a Word transmogrifies so totally into Hollywood hooey that it's actually a relief. I'd hate to see a disturbance in the karmic perfection of Douglas's pitch-pure mediocrity.

An ordeal for all save the most ardent Treksters.

Palmetto, directed by the German genius Schlondorff, who memorably brought "The Tin Drum" to the screen, somehow never quite finds the right line through the materials.

Hoodwinked makes a little sense. Too bad, then, it's so crummy.

Tries so hard to be cool that it forgets to be alive.

What a waste of talent, time and money. And guess what else? Not only is The Legend of Zorro stupid and boring but -- ta-da! -- it's also really long!