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]