William Goss

Faithful to the superficial thrills and flaws of the original.

Given Garant and Lennon’s background on “The State” and “Reno 911,” their scattershot approach as filmmakers isn’t especially surprising; for every oddly specific Shakespeare reference or detour to the local po-boy joint, there’s an ongoing parade of puke and an awful rubber suit with which to contend.

It’s the odd touch of local color — like the backdrop of an abandoned amusement park, or the arrival of a Civil War steamer crewed by Confederate zombies — that makes these routine acts of derring-do a bit easier to bear.

At first, it’s all fun and games whenever somebody gets hurt, but that’s not enough in and of itself to sustain the movie’s tension. We’re left waiting for characters to die off without much of a vested interest in anyone’s survival.

A visually colorful but otherwise vanilla continuation of the series.

Rare is the Western that’s too low-rent to be satisfyingly lurid, but with hardly any tension or personality to its name, Sweetwater just misses the mark.

The fact that Johnny Depp alone gets top billing above the title, The Lone Ranger, despite not playing said character sums up the generally misguided approach taken by Depp and the creative crew behind the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise in bringing last century’s radio and TV hero back to the big screen in a big way.

Last Love hardly presents itself as a challenging picture, tugging as it does at the heartstrings with gentle persistence, but at its best moments, it is a sweetly considered one.

The truth is, while Red Lights isn't terrifically scary, it is thrilling in other ways, constantly playful and often tongue-in-cheek as it works through the hokey conventions of the genre.

At the end of the day, it’s a sure-handed sequel, but not a terribly thrilling one.

Yes, surely for them, the lucky few and probable many, 21 and Over will be the Best Movie Ever. For the rest of us, though, it’s something of a chore.

Its ultimate merits may be few, but if nothing else, it stands on its own sweaty terms.

Frankly, no one in this ensemble is done any favors by Jason Hall and Barry Levy’s screenplay, a “Duplicity” for dummies filled to the brim with double-crossing cliches.

All the horror hallmarks do little to compensate for a dearth of genuine scares or surprises, and DiBlasi’s workmanlike approach isn’t distinctive enough to transcend the script’s clichés.

Should satisfy the planet of b-boys and girls to whom it preaches.

Every scene of Danny Mooney’s directorial debut is brightly lit, every car squeaky clean, every moral dilemma transparent, with evidently thorough period detail undone by production values that lend even the riots an idyllic glow, while foiling the potential for truly dramatic conflict with leaden dialogue and predictable changes of heart.

To the film’s credit, it doesn’t waste much time in doling out shadowy figures and fake-outs for the gullible and easily goosed, and the cast as a whole dutifully delivers its panicked looks and cries in the night.