Perhaps vice isn't what it used to be, or maybe Crockett and Tubbs just aren't all that interesting when removed from their appropriate time slot, but this may well be the dreariest and most monochromatic time you'll have at the movies all summer.

Even a C-section couldn't rescue the shallow script and overplayed performances by Hugh Grant and Tom Arnold.

While past parodies like Airplane! and the marginally worthwhile Hot Shots filled out down time with slapstick visuals and spastic throwaway gags, Loaded Weapon is content to lumber along at its own boring pace: you end up checking your watch between jokes, and there's nothing funny about that.

Almost insufferably sufferable. It's a chick flick of the tallest order, with schmaltz galore and the sort of ongoing romantic hubris that practically screams, "This is codswallop, right?"

Consider this yet another nail in the Eighties coffin.

Certain scenes play as if Reiner forgot to show up on the day of filming, so the actors and cameraman just winged it. Perhaps his embarrassing (and pointless) turn as Leah’s clueless accompanist with the bad toupee distracted him from his principal responsibilities behind the camera. What a Meathead.

A studied but silly misfire from the director of the abysmal London Has Fallen that attempts to walk the walk without ever actually being a movie genre fans, or much of anyone else for that matter, would want to see.

Can barely limp to its final CinemaScope sunset shot.

The only thing saving Lake City from total ridiculousness is Spacek.

Ultimately sinks under the weight of its good intentions. It’s like watching Univision or Telemundo on the big screen.

The result is a goofy-weird mishmash of some pretty swell CGI creatures and some downright lousy screenwriting.

Although I'm generally a fan of movies that choose to star girls (of any age) as their lead subjects, Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer simply strikes the same whiny chord over and over.

There's a clumsiness here, a succession of setups and awkward payoffs that are so on-the-nose, so cringe-inducingly earnest, that it's hard not to laugh. Even the story behind Grace's name is more likely to trigger guffaws than the kind of sentimental welling-up intended.

Fumbles on so many levels it's just plain silly. To paraphrase the film's tagline: The Thirteenth Floor: You can go there, but why would you want to?

Only good old Leatherface literally mirrors the festering cultural and political corruption of the era, and to the film's vast discredit, this hideous echo is never even noted.

Whether it’s a case of miscasting is unclear, but without a willing hero to anchor this already dubious movie from start to finish, The Great Wall hits a brick wall.

Not quite loud enough to be a seasonal blockbuster, Mercury Rising is instead more of a dull thud on the action film map, fodder for Willis fanatics, and not much else.

Somewhere between conception and execution the movie turned sour and most of the cuteness was replaced with venom and malice.

Director Irwin Winkler and his cast obviously hope to shed light on the boundaries of love, and instead come up with a walloping case of the preachies.

Unfortunately, most of the budget seems to have been spent on the first half, a murky slog through the depths of the meg-infested abyssal depths of the titular Trench where the characters are puddle-deep and the villains so cardboard that their biggest danger isn't being chum but dissolving in water.

They are all part of a great American tradition. Hate them if you want to, but you might as well hate gated communities, "The Real World," and the war on terror while you're at it.

The kind of film that will be suitable for all-ages entertainment once the family runs out of conversation after devouring all the turkey, but it's unlikely to expand its audience beyond these captives.

From the start, Need for Speed smells like a movie in search of a franchise. On that count, it’s somewhat fast but seldom furious.

There actually is some clever dialogue in the film, especially early on between Roadblock and Duke (Tatum). But this fades over the course of the film, and too much of what the characters say sounds as though it’s been lifted verbatim from 1930s and 1940s serials.

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey isn't much of a trip. In a word...NOT!!!

Little more than paint-by-numbers filmmaking, and it fails in the most important charge of any children's movie: to transport its young and impressionable audience to a world where anything is possible, rather than to one where everything’s been thought of already.

Apart from a few moments of fleeting suspense, Fifty Shades Darker resembles a Facebook feed of someone you kind of knew in high school who maybe went on to have a glamorous future, but everything seems a little bit off and contrived.

By the time the chorus of churchgoers end the film with a spirited rendition of Stevie Wonder’s rousing “As” following a demonstration of the healing power of forgiveness, you’re ready for a closing number. Hallelujah.

Like "Reservoir Dogs" by way of Ned Flanders, Mercy Streets is as earnest as Vacation Bible School and somewhat more cinematic.

The comedy is often harsh and cruel.

A character-driven piece with a character who seems somewhat hollow.

You don’t have to be a cynic to find Radio naive for suggesting that high school is a good place for emotionally fragile misfits, that racism is not a problem, that caring for someone is all it takes.

I've always said, "If you've seen one god, you've seen them all," and Wrath of the Titans only serves to underscore my point.

Collins and crew follow the well-worn tracks entertainingly enough, running up and down stairs and catching figures just at the corner of the shot and arguing about whether they should keep filming or not, but there’s nothing new.

Come True aims to explore the layers of the dreamworld, and the terrifying monsters that lurk in the depths of our minds. Yet the unconscious world writer/director Anthony Scott Burns dissects appears to evade him as well, with layers that lead to empty answers and a leading woman who is paper thin.

The worst thing about Bounce isn't that it's bad but that it just isn't interesting.

Lin’s F&F films are operatically dumb, which was what makes them so much fun; maybe if Star Trek Beyond were stupider it wouldn’t feel like such a chore.

The end result never really achieves much more than being exactly what it is: another horseshoes and hand grenades attempt to tell version ad infinitum of the legend of Bruce Lee.

On the not-much-of-a-plus side, at over two hours long, sitting through The Book Thief engenders in the viewer some serious sympathy for the interminable plight of poor, sickly Max, concealed below stairs in a dank, dark corner of the house on Himmelstrasse.

A godforsaken (possibly literally) mess.

The Happening is both too incoherenly weird and too narratively ambitious for its own good.

Ends up as little more than a recursive footnote to the infinitely better up-all-night teen comedies of, you guessed it, John Hughes.

The creature’s big reveal is masterfully handled and a final revelation is exceptionally memorable, but the characters, unsurprisingly, remain interchangeable with those of any number of other teens-in-peril pics.

If sex, gangsters, and killing Nazis are three of the most enlivening topics in the movies, then let us count friendship as one of the most tiresome, right up there with grooming horses and sharing for sheer thrills.

It’s not a movie. It’s a two-hour infomercial for biodiesel.

Crucial to the nature of the disaster film -- and something that Irwin Allen knew so very well -- is that films of this sort depend on an emotional hook, a peg of normalcy to hang the chaos from. Volcano offers no such hook, and as a result it plays like some La Brea dinosaur risen from the tar, all effects and no heart.

The script by S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock (Ghost Dad) is so jumbled and the direction so chaotic that it's often hard to tell what's going on -- where, when, and why.

The lesson learned from The Tale of Despereaux is that an overabundance of vocal talent does not a good cartoon make.

Combined with some awfully lazy riffs on Holmes’s fondness for his seven-per-cent solution, Holmes & Watson is not so much a case of whodunit as it is a question why bother.

What really drags it down is the wafer-thin script by Carol Chrest, which neither Sivertson nor a determined if sometimes overblown Ricci can pull past its messy metaphor and undeserved twists.

Summertime popcorn pictures don't get much goofier than this silly sequel, which is everything you'd expect and nothing you wouldn't.

Theologically muddled, narratively simplistic, and somehow pulling off a bigger waste of a legacy character than the near-blasphemous return of Sally Hardesty for 2022's ill-fated Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist: Believer proves that double the possessions does not mean double the fun.

The real problem with this Aliens encounter is that it's patently a Nick at Night midweek movie that inadvertently got greenlighted for a big-screen opening.

"When you race with the devil, you'd better be fast as hell." (And you, angry driver, are not that fast.)

Less a movie than a longform, live-action Celebrity Death Match between its leads, this wheezing comedy may herald the death knell of the interracial buddy-cop farce.

An inoffensive, eminently forgettable bit of fluff.

If you like "Maxim," you will love The Island. It is glossy. It is expensive. It has lots of slick ads for Aquafina and Cadillac.

The bottom line with the film is that there's just no damn mystery about it.

23 Blast is a well-acted inspirational sports drama that never quite rises above the treacly mire of cliches that seem inherent to the genre.

The most distressing thing is the complete lack of accountability for Tripp and Creech’s destructive joyride, which results in a significant amount of vehicular damage and possible human injury.

It's an intermittently amusing parable about an outcast's ascension, as performed by a pack of digitally manipulated dogs. Next.

The real problem with For Your Consideration is that it's just not funny.

When this stereotype masquerades as a storyline, it needs to have a unique spin or radical narrative disruption for it to stand out from all the other self-made movies about white male artists with girl problems and self-worth issues. In Stereo is not the movie that stands out from the rest.

The handful of redeeming moments in Jayne Mansfield’s Car belong to Duvall in the role of a septuagenarian who finds himself more and more at odds with a changing world.

Seeing what St. Andrews’ greens must have looked like in their native days before all golf courses became zealously manicured is refreshing. The film’s action, however, is rarely filmed in a way that highlights the action, and the story’s biographical elements lack dimension and drama.

The result is about as memorable as an evening spent shitfaced at your local Applebee’s.

What begins as a cute idea grows annoyingly sentimental before it is through.

Much more "Splish" than "Splash."

The movie's suspense derives from figuring out how wide the evil net has been cast. But in terms of suspense, this Net is full of holes.

The best thing you can say about The Perfect Guy is that it plays out like a gelded version of Fatal Attraction, lacking anything dark or dangerous. It plays it too safe, and who wants a guy like that?

The Resurrection of Gavin Stone isn’t as exploitive as some recent Christian-based films – for that, check out 2014’s truly offensive "Heaven Is for Real" – and while it’s got its charms, it’s far from likely to bring in any new converts.

From "Hands on a Hard Body" to an 89-minute ogling of another hard body: It boggles the mind that 11 years after his engrossing documentary about an endurance competition to win a truck in Longview, Texas, filmmaker Bindler has channeled his talents into this regrettable comedy.

I’m told Bella’s helplessness is true to the spirit of the novels, but so what? It’s almost 2010 – let’s get hip, people.

Pure Luck manages to deliver only four decent laughs in its entire 105-minute time.

Ill-conceived from any number of angles, this Peter Pan origin story, scripted by Jason Fuchs (Ice Age: Continental Drift), plays topsy-turvy with J.M. Barrie’s beloved characters.

Ross’ script is never able to pull this out of the depths of trite banality, every line and emotional beat clocked from a mile away and cribbed from every other faith-based drama you’ve ever seen.

When a human joke like Tony Robbins is the only one who comes away from your movie smelling like a rose, there's a real problem in Farrellyland.

Barely even worthy of a straight-to-video release, as simplistic and silly as it is.

Seems more like an amateur revue, perfectly all right for what it is, but not meant to be seen beyond an audience of friends and family.

Director-screenwriter Dearden, who wrote the script for Fatal Attraction, does a terrible job of making the pieces of the who's-he-going-to-kill-next narrative stick; jumping around with an unnerving frequency, this film self-destructs before your very eyes.

Maniscalco often talks about his father in his stand-up acts. Watching this film enforces the idea that maybe that’s where this story should have stayed.

There might be a glimmer of a theme in the film concerning faith, but it all drowns in too many tangents and dull minutiae. Recommended for die-hard fans only, Australia's Lost Gold is not worth its weight in much of anything.

Images seem to be grafted into the film that have little to do with the actual story.

The Equalizer 2 tries way too hard to play the action sequences straight.

It’s big, it’s slick, it’s very, very Hollywood, but it’s just not that good a film. It’s not even as much fun – and monster movies, as opposed to horror movies, should be fun – as the 1999 Brendan Fraser vehicle of the same name.

Never manages to be either very funny or very compelling.

School for Scoundrels varies between taking itself seriously and not, leaving the viewer alternately confused and disappointed.

Could have used a touch of Madea’s down-home, self-reliant wisdom to spice up the marital doldrums of these four buppie couples.

The acting is terrible,with Connery, at his lowest common denominator, stealing the show. For those of you who worry that MTV video art will destroy cinema, the ineptitudes of this film vividly detail the radical difference in forms. It sucks. But it would have made a great comic book.

Maybe taking a cue from his namesake dish, that much-maligned Scottish pudding concoction made with sheep innards and root vegetables, Haggis presents a mishmash of genres in this redo of Fred Cavayé's 2008 French film "Pour Elle."

There's not much more to this poorly scripted thriller than exactly one well-done shock moment and Michael Keaton's eyebrows, but, to be fair, Keaton's brows have carried three Tim Burton films nearly on their own, so don't let this dissuade you from seeing the film.

Aloft’s characters exude a certain impregnability, and the story’s structure only further distances us from them.

What we’re left with is a plodding, pompous horror, only memorable for the ways that it completely drops the ball in sidelining its headliner to take a poor shot at turning this into a series about something oh-so-ever important. It’s just as silly as any of the original sequels and is maybe even more egregious given the inherent benefit of hindsight and the fact that this outing seems to think it’s outsmarting the formula.

A Hallmark movie with a major dose of God thrown in, I’m sure there’s an audience out there for Redeeming Love. After all, 3 million people who bought the book can’t be wrong (they can, it’s trash). Think Little House on the Prairie on Cialis.

187 (the title refers to copspeak for a homicide) circles round and round, never making a salient point that isn't countered by another, utterly opposite notion three scenes later.

Herzfeld also wrote the screenplay, and so its leaden and obvious tone and the resulting dearth of delicacy rests squarely on him.

It’s really just a tortuous series of blackout sketches hung together with the flimsiest of threads.

This year's entry in this lowly subgenre is Four Christmases, a D-list comedy with A-list actors.