Tom Russo

An intermittently arresting, mostly standard action entry that deals death noisily more than cleverly - a lot like the original.

It’s a deep-thinking character study that’s provocatively if imperfectly presented — at least until the story devolves right along with its subject’s state of mind.

The thematic stuff, while well-intentioned, is also clunky, and ultimately beside the point. Action, obviously, is what you’re after.

The title might trumpet Harley Quinn’s emancipation, but she again feels like a character trapped in a movie that’s mediocre at best.

It’s fun in stretches, but also busily forced.

The movie works best when it finds a balance between flatly familiar and over-aggressively unexpected.

Unfortunately, as the story builds toward tenderness, it’s undercut with slathering tongues and bare-chested stud-muffin shots.

It’s another brightly rendered effort, but, as the title indicates, a lot of the real creativity seems to have been used up the first time around.

After a point, we’re left wondering whether we’re watching a character study or caricature. Either way, the portrait gradually morphs from intriguing to tedious.

The guys in Metallica are here to remind us that there’s a band behind the rage rock. The IMAX 3-D release Metallica Through the Never is all about reasserting their relevance, loudly.

You’ll have to appreciate what fleeting cleverness you can here.

Director and Team Besson member Camille Delamarre (“Brick Mansions”) speeds us from one action sequence to the next with a style that alternates between routine, clunky, and modestly inspired.

To Chu’s credit, he does work hard not only to legitimize 30-somethings’ halcyon recollections, but also to make the material relevant to a new generation.

In the end, though, the film disappointingly, even lazily, shies away from being anything more than you’d expect.

The crew doesn’t much look the part either, save for Schaech’s Stalin ’stache. Yet the movie does show the ability to get past this, even with the weight of all its narratively risky conspiracy theorizing. It’s a shame the intrigue has to get torpedoed by elements that mostly feel correctable.

The movie's unlikely sincerity can't completely offset its ugliness for less bloodthirsty viewers, but it helps, and it does smooth over some narrative rough edges.

What starts out as a lowbrow gag very typical of a pedestrian ’toon gradually balloons into absurdity that Mel Brooks would probably love. Here, at least, the Angry Birds fly.

A characteristic early offering from horror icon David Cronenberg, rough production values and all. [30 May 2004]

Best, probably, to appreciate the movie for what Slattery, Hoffman, and the cast do most effectively: craft a pervasive atmosphere of tired people trudging through tired circumstances that only seem to grow more, well, tiring.

It’s a movie content to stay within the show’s comfort zone, changing things up mainly with flashier, 3-D visuals, a couple of which are dazzlers, and a theme that doesn’t connect in any notable way.

It makes you wonder if the series' animators, who took time out for "Rio" just before this, aren't so secretly yearning to sail different creative waters.

Pretty clearly determined to deliver the antidote to Stallone's movie, the filmmakers take their cues from Christopher Nolan's Batman filmscape, dropping Dredd into a fictional concrete sprawl (actually South Africa) that's relentlessly grounded, visually and dramatically. In a generic way, the environment works.

Some entertaining inventiveness, before nagging limitations finally drag it down.

It's a surprise that Stallone is as funny as he is playing a hit man paired with a cop in Bullet to the Head. He's man-cave witty in a way that his "Expendables" movies have strived for but haven't really managed.

After all the mesmerizingly illicit buildup, the film’s willful lack of a payoff is almost as strange as one of those essays.

An original thriller about a home-invasion robbery gone wrong. To clarify, that would be “wrong” as in “not according to plan” – but also “wrong” as in “so dementedly repugnant, it just isn’t right.”

Returning director Sean Anders strings together mayhem-filled moments that just aren’t the howlers that they’re clearly scripted to be, never mind the fatherly foursome’s chemistry, or the tobacco-stained guffaws Gibson keeps busting out to sell these bits.

It’s all a fair attempt, but Aselton isn’t going to make anyone forget Kathryn Bigelow.

A sharper script would have been the real ultimate weapon.

Despite the material’s fit, the story’s relentlessly downbeat tone is challenging. Strong performances by Logan Lerman (“Fury”) and Sarah Gadon (Hulu’s “11.22.63”) can’t keep the film from feeling like exhaustingly slow going.

In one amusing bit of dialogue, Stallone and Schwarze-negger kid each other about being smarter than they look. For a little while at least, we thought we might be able to say the same about Escape Plan.

Not that the movie’s various shortcomings are all on Moore. British genre director and co-writer Johannes Roberts (“Storage 24”) gives her nothing but trite drama to work with in setting up the story, and an overload of distracting, reductive prattle once she hits the water.

Stallone and De Niro simply don’t generate enough combative spark to make this anything more than an amiably mediocre diversion.

It’s clear To is striving to keep the action gripping and creative. Modestly inspired is more like it.

You’ll have to be satisfied with a modest assortment of energetically comic moments here, because the story sure isn’t a reason to catch this encore, and neither are who-asked-for-’em cast additions such as Ken Jeong.

First-time director Nick Ryan isn’t entirely up to the challenge in The Summit, but he does deliver some dramatic and visual highs in the attempt.

Trouble is, the movie’s dopiness isn’t in fact something you can get past. “American Assasinine” is frequently more like it.

But when there's such a lighthearted, boys-at-play manner about the story's established aspects, it creates an odd disconnect from the World War II tolerance lessons that the filmmakers seek to add. War and persecution are bad, kids - except when it's all in good fun.

Cooper swaggers as convincingly as always, the food-prep montages are mesmerizing, and we even get a couple of solid twists and an education on the sous-vide trend.

Pixels may feel flatter to kids of the ’80s than it does to moviegoers too young to have known Pac-Man from Ant-Man.

Alba, meanwhile, is again ridiculously shoehorned into a comedy gig, although she does have an amusing opening bit spying while nine months pregnant. If only diaper bomb gags weren't the inevitable follow-up.

Monster Trucks might not be a complete lemon, but it’s hardly cherry.

It’s tough to stay focused on the provocative bits when soapy talk of teenage yearning and angst keep making us snicker.

The cast does capable work, but you’ll wish the movie concentrated more on the comedy, which has some zing, rather than the straighter elements, which quickly start to drag.

If only there were more genuine rah-rah fun involved, instead of just endless, thudding, seen-it-all-before mayhem.

In the end, the movie leaves us stuck with unmoving drama and increasingly numbing carnage.

There’s nary an honorable death that resonates, although we do get some creative visual perspectives on enthusiastically digitized brutality. But wasn’t the game good for that already?

The repartee, as ever, is weak. Even with all the extra layers of digital detail, it’s still tough to keep these four straight. And the CG characters’ slimy rendering and motion-capture expressiveness could go down with “The Polar Express” as a study in inadvertent, technologically misguided screen creepiness. Wackier would have been OK, guys — it’s the Ninja Turtles.

As tiresome as the relentless, indulgent inscrutability and lack of story momentum can be, it says something for the movie’s visceral power that there isn’t an urge to quit on it.

The plot doesn’t take clever turns, the visual thrills aren’t all that thrilling, and you’re ultimately left to get your heist-movie kicks elsewhere.

This last angle had us thinking back to “Risky Business,” as did the Chicago setting and the reveling gone off the rails. Here, though, there’s no edge to the wildness, nothing memorable.

Eckhart doesn’t really do any of that classic grunting as Frankenstein 2.0, but maybe he should have.

Despite a few diverting moments and some ambitiously dramatic themes, this one is simply too uneventful and too populated by thinly sketched characters to keep its target audience engaged.

The film’s lone strength is the fleeting dramatic scenes offering a little back story — and pathos — on Rafe’s home life with his sweetly understanding single mom (Lauren Graham, who you’d guess wouldn’t have bothered otherwise).

Audiences are going to want to brace themselves, too – for a movie that refuses to recognize when it’s going too far, with its wince-eliciting jokes about jailhouse rape in particular.

Funny about retribution, though - it's a tricky thing to make time for when you've still got mutant zombie hordes after you. The real premise turns out to be a busy rehash of the first movie's story line.

How funny that Pryce, a tweedy Brit playing a bad guy, should be the one person doing anything remotely heroic for this dud.

Unfortunately, Mann also leans on ill-fitting story elements that he might easily and smartly have avoided, and the movie’s rhythms and credibility pay for it.

The movie grows easier to like in the later, straighter going, as it stops pushing so aggressively to be naughty and lets its characters try on some introspection.

Boston University product Gary Fleder (“Kiss the Girls”) directs the action with grungy efficiency, and the movie does hook us with a certain lurid anticipation of just how far things might escalate.

Writer-director Boaz Yakin delivers his conflicting elements mostly as intended, and with obvious ambition. But he fails to take care of certain fundamentals - most problematically, coaxing out the emotion he's seeking from Statham and young newcomer Catherine Chan.

After a fast, funny start, the new sequel, Johnny English Reborn, proves to be more of the same.

The Wild Life, while pleasant, is just too flat to meet the challenge.

The script’s messy seams also show in the parade of sidekicks that passes through Kaulder’s door as a new threat develops.

Home “again”? It seems that first-timer Meyers-Shyer isn’t setting so much as a piggy toe beyond familiar territory, and this listless rom-com shows it.

A movie that passably ambles along in generic-melodrama mode before finally insulting audience intelligence one time too many.

Compared with last time, the returning team of director Steve Pink and writer Josh Heald practically doodle the gang’s motivations and worse, their surroundings.

This chronicle of an ’80s high school cross country coach leading a team of Mexican farm laborers’ kids to competitive glory may be based on a true story, but the forced drama doesn’t help it to feel that way.

Alpha and Omega is sweet, if not fresh.

However well-intentioned the movie may be, it spills over with flat cutesy humor, making a slog out of an experience that should be filled with wonder.

Among the ingredients “21” is missing: the infectiously random silliness of a Zach Galifianakis, the smug hunkiness of a Bradley Cooper, and any sort of Vegas-y gloss whatsoever.

All over the map in the details it throws at us, and the level of immaturity it aims for.

There is less eye candy than you would expect, and it’s underwhelming.

It just feels misguided, not clever, when John Waters is dragged out for a cameo. That’s when you know the filmmakers must realize how hopelessly they’re caught in a loop-the-loop of punchless comedy.

It’s only in the late going that the marital drama turns somewhat more authentic, helping to restore a bit of the audience’s, well, faith.

For the sequel, London Has Fallen, Butler and director Babak Najafi (HBO’s “Banshee”) strike a tone that’s more consistent — consistently dumb.

There’s no redeeming this softcore nonsense, which plays like a script that “Storage Wars” stumbled across in Joe Eszterhas’s old locker.

By the time the giant, snarling spider shows up - the most boggling of the movie's various "holy schnitzel" touches - parents of the littlest "Hoodwinked" fans may be feeling hoodwinked themselves.

Quaint and crass get together — or would that be “bump uglies”? — with awkward, thoroughly flat results in The Big Wedding, an ensemble comedy with a tonal cluelessness as surprising as the name cast that signed on for it anyway.

The squirminess stands out here because there's so little going on the rest of the time.

Just one more touch of “realism” in a sexual melodrama played so straight that it’s nuts.

Ultimately, what Fantastic Four delivers is change for change’s sake, rather than change for the better.

In the end, it’s hard to remember another action entry that expends so much energy on frenetic blacktop choreography and attention-deficit editing with so little to show for it.

H.G. Wells's tale of nature's little critters turned steroidal gets cheesy screen treatment from director Bert I. Gordon, a veteran of the ginormous creature genre of the '50s. [09 Sep 2007, p.N32]

Never thought we'd say this about a movie, but Bucky Larson probably doesn't wring as much out of recurring bodily-fluid gags as it could.

This is mythology that’s famously transportive in every sense, but the animators struggle to take us anywhere truly captivating, or even clearly defined.

Fresh or not, creatively merited or not, here it comes: the third installment of Martin Lawrence's big, dopey franchise.

It’s an idea that could make for decent genre viewing, if only its cast had some range, and its indie reach didn’t exceed its mainstream-polished grasp.

None of this is as riotously zany as it wants to be.

The best we get here are modest action diversions.

Not that there’s all manner of comedy craftsmanship demanding study here, but the movie does seem to be a funny jumble of contradictory impulses.