Stephen Hunter

A karate movie so devoid of inner substance that it threatens to suck all known life on planet Earth into the void at its center. [20 Mar 1991]

It is the perfect modern product: loud, banal, empty, frenzied, plasticized, flavorless, drab, violent in a bloodless way and sexy in a sexless way.

If ever a project seemed utterly unguided by a compass, it's "North," the dreary new film from Rob Reiner. [22 Jul 1994]

Folks, I really feel that seeing this one for you is the movie critic's equivalent of jumping on the grenade to save your lives. Send me medals.

I like watching snakes eat mice just as much as the next fella, maybe even more, but The Strangers turns the gobble-'em-up into an ordeal. It's a fraud from start to finish.

The film is one of those accursed self-styled "outrageous" comedies that play the horrific for broad laughs, with a comically inflated style of dialogue that's so hip one doubts it could have been conceived before 1997, much less 1847.

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.

Though R-rated, its real target audience is under 18 -- either in years or IQ points.

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.

It's not brazenly bad or heroically bad or stridently bad. It's bad in all the old, dull ways of being bad: poor performances, absurd story, dreary special effects, witless dialogue and the excessive length of someone taking himself far too seriously.

In the end the movie goes nowhere a hundred movies haven't already been and tells us nothing we don't already know. It does so with so much violent energy, however, it's like four brutal years at film school crammed into an hour and a half.

After a fast, smart start, White Sands implodes like a black hole, sucking all goodwill from the atmosphere of the theater, turning those of us who started to love it into embittered cuckolds.

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

Tells us nothing we didn't already know, and it tells it over and over and over.

Gilliam does two things well: mud and trees.

If the movie were merely unfunny, one might dismiss it with an airy wave of the hand in a paragraph or two without breaking a sweat or digging into the old adjective tool box, but "Car 54, Where Are You?" is actively repulsive.

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.

The movie is fussy and organized rather than moving. It follows a pattern so precisely, it's as if Lahti thought points would be taken off if she colored outside the lines.

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.

Makes "Conan the Barbarian" seem like Dostoyevsky in its complexity.

The result isn't merely ludicrous, it's something far worse. It's drab. It's uninteresting. It squanders Chan's uniqueness; it could even be said to squander Jennifer Love Hewitt!

Super Mario Bros. ain't no game, but it ain't no movie, either. The huge, busy, empty, uninvolving mess is marooned halfway between narrative and spectacle, neither fully one nor the other. [28 May 1993]

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.

About halfway through you'll get an incredible hunger to see a movie.

A coarse, witless and stunningly violent black comedy.

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.

A veritable clinic in irritation. Just thinking about it irritates me deeply.

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.

An animated King and I? Now there's torture, especially in this wretched, lurid, absurd concoction which seems to have been conceived to annoy adults and bore children.

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.

There should be a special room in Hell where the makers of films like Patch Adams are sent.

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.

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

As an example of smash-mouth environmentalism, you'd be hard-pressed to surpass Fire Down Below. As an example of right-thinking American compassion and concern for our precious natural heritage and all the fuzzy fauna and fernyflora of the great outdoors, it's extremely forthright. And as a movie, it's a piece of drivel...Ugh! What a distasteful, silly, egomaniacal movie. [6 Sept 1997, p.D03]

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

Thr3e needs help with more than spelling.

The dialogue is fast but bad, the acting is loud but awful and the morality is chaste but unromantic. As for the food, it looks vulgar.

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 has no moments of athletic grace amid the chaos, no apparent sense of strategy. It's basically just mayhem set to rock music.

It's a kind of "Miami Vice" with many more carz and numberz where all the adjectives used 2 go.

What you get is the V trifecta: vile, vicious and violent. Oh, and incoherent and stupid. A mess. A mean-spirited completely worthless film that can never give back the two hours it seizes from you.

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.

The most persistent question asked at When Do We Eat? will probably be "When do we leave?" This abrasive Passover comedy-drama is extremely difficult to sit through, and if its makers weren't all Jewish, it would be considered anti-Semitic.

It's just gunfights strung together, without a whisper of coherence or meaning. The fights are staged so that they all look the same, and the principle is always the same: The gunman's multiple antagonists never hit, and he never misses. John Woo at least had fun with this sort of thing 20 years ago. And Giamatti? What the heck is he doing here?

Just another thriller, utterly disposable.

Here, by its cooperation with the Disney factory, NASCAR says it's also warm 'n' cuddly, and that if you love your magic bug, it'll repay you with victory. Why does it allow itself to be co-opted by a story that diminishes the skills, experience and talent it takes to win?

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.

Overblown, overheated, overdirected, overacted, overlong.

Beginning with an intriguing premise, which it manages to squander in record time, it turns out to be a thinly imagined, thinly acted, silly exercise in car crashes, chases and nasty outbursts of generic violence.

It continually crashes and burns on its own banality.

So primitive, it must have been written in lizard blood on animal skin.

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.

It manages to find an almost pitch-perfect accumulation of ill-matched tones, sheer grotesquerie, near-heroic absurdity and self-canceling folly.

The two guys are potentially amusing but the screenplay is so naked in its manipulation of emotion that it feels infantile.

The movie is simply not professional. It's not, even by the lowest standards of Republic B-westerns in the '30s or bad, cheap horror films in the '50s, releasable.

So twitchy, fidgety, skittery and wiggly that the drug it made me yearn for was Dramamine, followed by a chaser of bourbon, 12 years old.

This one's a turkey as big as the Eiffel Tower but it's bad in a particularly American way: It's wildly overdone, it throws in everything in an attempt to appeal to everyone, it's gargantuan and anti-logical, pointlessly ornate and pointlessly violent.

Here's a film that so merrily thumbs its nose at propriety in exchange for visceral thrills, and at probability in exchange for the really cool plot twist, that it checks in as the guiltiest pleasure since "The 13th Warrior."

Just what we need least: a warm family comedy about child molestation.That's Georgia Rule, which combines battleship actresses of the "Steel Magnolias" variety, fall-down-go-boom comedy that was obsolete in the '30s, Lindsay Lohan's cleavage and intergenerational fondling just for kicks.

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

Some stories are eternal. They will not go away. They are told and retold for generations. Take the story of Jesse James --it is not one of them.

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, Jennifer 8 is about four bricks shy a load and two hours too long.

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

This movie, written in crayon by James Kearns, is too dumb to come up with a way of defeating the system by using its own rules.

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.

At least it cares enough to steal from the very best. Unfortunately, that's about all it cares about.

It goes so far -- way too far -- as having a known actor play Grant.

So smug and so proud of itself, and you can tell that everybody involved conceives of it as a civics lesson instead of a story, that they squeeze all the life out of it.

So predictable it could have been written by a chimp who's watched too much TV, the huge movie is as dumb as it is loud, and it's way too loud.

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

One thing the makers of Saving Silverman do not have to worry about: Hannibal Lecter will never visit them to eat their brains. That is because they have no brains.

Oh, please. Stop and smell the manure.

There's not a moment in Boiling Point that could be said to achieve a narrative temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Boil? This limpid pool of cliche and predictability never even bubbles.

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.

A meet-cute whimsy set among divorced fifty-somethings in New York, it blunders on toward oblivion, excruciatingly unfunny and pitifully unromantic.

An Upper West Sidey exercise in narcissism and self-congratulation disguised as a tribute.

We're supposed to adore Gibson's sang-froid and his toughness, but everything, a few good lines aside, is so witless and monotonous it becomes numbing.

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

It can't fake sincerity. It tries ever so hard, but it doesn't have a single believable second. Every word in it is a lie.