If not better, a Part II always has to be bigger. In the case of The Hangover Part II, that means raunchier, nastier, darker. It also means much more predictable, which is ruinous.

“Baby” is to Helen Fielding’s original 1996 novel and its 2001 movie adaptation what “Sex and the City 2” was to the HBO series — a cause not for celebration but overdue burial.

For the most part, Fluffy’s material is just that — fluff, with a touch now and then of bile and bad taste.

The movie's comic powers are often marred by silliness and stereotypes. Pootie tanks.

The problem with the realization of this concept, Drop Dead Fred, is its lack of subtlety. The filmmakers go too broad. Where there should be whimsy, there is grating farce. The character of Fred is like "Laugh-In" comedian Alan Sues doing Monty Python comedy skits on Billy Idol for "Sesame Street." Whenever he's onscreen, he's picking his nose and slinging food and muttering insults. Early into the movie, he gets on your nerves. [24 May 1991, p.52]

Venom, the movie, is a reptilian Marvel mishmash whose touch saps the life force of almost everyone in it.

School is endlessly talky, with dialogue that has the consistency of melted licorice (red or black, your choice). The one thing to be said for Theodore Shapiro’s muscularly egregious score is that the music makes it marginally easier to miss what the characters are saying.

Dreadful.

A chick flick that makes its chick characters - and by extension its chick audience - look like hateful, backward toddlers, and there is something wrong with that.

McAvoy’s performance is a deep, deep shade of gonzo and by far the most enjoyable aspect of Victor Frankenstein — you don’t often see over-acting this enthusiastic or this flecked with spittle.

As it adds extraneous characters, “Oh, Hi!” becomes so frustrating and unbelievable that I wanted to yell advice at the screen.

It's a warmed-over suspense thriller that's more disturbing than it is surprising or scary.

The leads are all vaguely Protestant and all suspiciously chipper, yet this dopey farce somehow backs itself into cross-dressing, gender reversal, and gay camp while insisting that everything's in good, butch fun. [23 Feb 2007, p.D10]

Song deconstructs rom-com tropes in service to a much meaner drama, with unlikable characters, a flimsy love triangle, and a dark subplot that is poorly handled.

Most of the time Ernest Rides Again is a one-joke - or, rather, one-cannon - movie, enough to raise grave doubts about the importance of seeing - let alone being - Ernest. [12 Nov 1993, p.47]

When Laura Linney turns up about an hour into The Hottest State, you can see the movie that might have been.

Aliens in the Attic is conveyor-belt family product, an action/adventure/sci-fi/comedy made from the bland corporate DNA of Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. It appears designed for families who never leave the mall.

It can’t be recommended even to people who mostly just want to see Amanda Seyfried naked.

Taken as a whole, The Sunlit Night is fey and inconclusive, and whether something of more substance got cut in the post-Sundance re-edit or was never there to begin with is at this point moot. The movie’s up a most beautiful creek without a paddle.

As for the movie itself, it's tolerable.

A documentary about comedy needs to be funny. The old guys, as noted, have definitely lost a lot off their collective fastball.

Fienberg’s film spends most of its time trying to convince us that true love starts when you stop playing games. Then, in the final minutes, it reverses itself and puts gamesmanship back up on another wobbly pedestal. The result is hard to cheer.

It doesn't know if it wants to wallow in its characters' pity or to flesh them out with their own personalities. So it does both, with half-hearted results.

This time casting Sharon Stone as the victim instead of the predator, it's both sillier and baser than "Basic Instinct," but not as funny, or even as laughable. And it's certainly not sexy. Essentially, it's an industrial object, badly manufactured, filled not with hot stuff, but with the cold dead air of calculation gone wrong. At least no artistry has been wasted on it, although it does squander a provocative theme under its pile of softcore hardware before struggling to its limp ending. [21 May 1993, p.23]

Gabizon never establishes a consistent tone or point of view. Instead, we hop from one episode to the next, with no momentum and no reason to care about these people.

The only recommendable thing about Norbit is that he's not as bad as every other person in this movie.

The larger problem is that the central duo is just plain dull.

The average Bollywood routine is passionately cheesy. This movie seems cursed with a lactose intolerance.

The next time Grodin attempts a comeback, it would be so great if he avoids movies where he might be upstaged by a sandwich stunt.

Prinze charming, but can't save movie.

Never having decided whether it wants to be comedy or a sentimental hand-wringer, it tries to be both and winds up being neither.

Equilibrium just happens to be a really bad comic book.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid the movie returns Kinney's tale to live-action reality, and the party's over.

For a movie that's sexist, racist, and possibly the most deeply closeted gay love story to be released this year, After the Sunset is reasonably entertaining.

The problem in The One isn't the black holes in the universe, to which the characters refer at periodic intervals, but the black hole on the screen. The One is a zero.

Date Movie has enough laughs to make rambunctious dudes hoot and holler, but not nearly enough to ensure the happy ending it promises.

Settles for the cliches of American suspense films, right down to an ending that leaves the door open to a possible sequel.

Takers might have made a perfectly decent little B heist movie, but someone had to go and forget to give the cameraman his Ritalin.

Mostly plays like an artificial stupidity experiment. Zappy visuals aside, it's essentially a reactionary take on science, stemming from the movies' traditional belief that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and a lot of knowledge is worse. Think of it as Faust Goes to the Lab, with an ambitious doc serving as Mephistopheles. [6 Mar 1992, p.30]

A slick but dull new shoot- ' em-up from Jamaica, doesn't penetrate the mysteries of high-rolling, high-risk thug life.

Be warned, though: This is the multiplex equivalent of ADD.

Aloha is as generic as its title. The islands exist solely as an exotic backdrop for the pretty Hollywood haoles to play in. Business as usual, and I never thought I’d say that about a Cameron Crowe movie.

A sludgy action thriller with an out-of-shape star, Blood and Money doesn’t have a lot going for it other than its setting: the uncharted north Maine woods in the dead of winter.

The movie must be bad, right? Worse, it’s a bore.

Maudlin script mars teen love.

Strenuously as it tries, and pulse-poundingly successful as the embassy rescue scene is, Rules of Engagement never engages us.

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

Hobbled by its vaguely insulting comic-book version of the '60s and by a humorlessness that can only come from talented people convinced they're creating work for the ages.

There have been plenty of movies adapted from video games before, but Hitman may be the first one that actually feels like a computer wrote and directed it.

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

Pureed, predictable conflation of ''Alien'' and ''Titanic'' and ''The Shining.''

Introduce the supernatural, and anything goes. Here, everything does. And that's a problem no one can solve. At least it wasn't called "Case 666."

More disappointing than the film’s inertia and amorphousness is its sacrifice of the real-world themes of class, money, corruption, and power. Unable to decide what story he wanted to tell, Téchiné hedges his bets and loses everything.

I admire Maniscalco’s decision to make his character the butt of the jokes, literally and figuratively. If only the jokes were funny. He has zero romantic chemistry with Bibb, who appears to be acting in another movie entirely, but he and De Niro make a credible father and son.

This take, like so many Hollywood takes on French comic originals, is diligent, but, with too few exceptions, irredeemably soggy. [09 Aug 1991, p.42]

Faced with a limited location and concept, Renfroe points his camera everywhere: The movie's seriously overshot, never settling for one angle when five would do.

A movie about ordinary American heroes that stars ordinary American heroes. About 15 minutes of the film concerns the actual heroics. The rest is . . . ordinary.

To be blunt, Raising Cain is a thriller that doesn't thrill. [07 Aug 1992, p.30]

Hopefully the last, of the fake trailer spinoffs of 2007's "Grindhouse." It makes last year's "Machete" look like "The King's Speech."

The Intern is bizarrely retrograde, implying that every working woman only needs a cuddly Yoda daddy to make it in the world of business. It’s soft in the heart — and soft in the head.

In addition to being a lousy musical, “Folie à Deux” is also a dreadfully dull courtroom drama.

A few of the sequences are bad enough to be funny, especially the ones involving Sheen skulking around alien central in a red jump suit, falling down a lot, as if directed by Ed Wood. [31 May 1996, p.52]

The cast is earnest and they almost convince us they’re doing important rather than self-important work.

This is all a long way of saying that the best way to better understand the man who made those and dozens of other movies is simply to see them. There's no case to be made for a mangy shortcut like Hitchcock. It's all surface and formula.

Fifty Shades Freed is as boring as . . . well . . . Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele. It’s a trilogy climax that should be fun, but it’s monotonous — maybe because we’ve seen it all before.

Nothing in How to Lose Friends feels fresh or on target.

The problem is that the movie offers no way of differentiating between them beyond their hairstyles.

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

The Disney people have taken such obvious care in making Return to Oz that it's a shame it didn't turn out better. It has its moments - mostly visual - but when it isn't a grim downer, it's largely inert. [21 Jun 1985, p.21]

When it's funny it's uproarious. Otherwise, you're crestfallen to discover that the movie is a relentless sucker punch to black entrepreneurship.

This adaptation feels like a soap opera made by someone who has seen too much late-stage Woody Allen and flounders with the self-importance of a director unable to read either text or city.

The strip is now a cartoonish sitcom pretending to be a romantic comedy about a drama queen and his adventures in lust. The movie might have gotten away with it, were it interested in romance or comedy.

Despite its handsome photography and a few memorable performances, The Aryan Couple is mainly notable for its inappropriate, blithe sentimentality.

Writer-director Liz W. Garcia depicts Leigh’s quandary with a heavy hand that gets heavier as the movie goes on, ending with one of those portentous freeze-frames that worked in “The 400 Blows” and never since.

"Star Trek VI" is one of the weaker additions to the Enterprise enterprise. It merely goes through the motions, including requisite moments that feel obligatory and uninspired. There's nothing gravely wrong here - no embarrassing scenes or egregious plot gaffes. There's simply nothing new, and certainly nothing fresh or reinvented. [6 Dec. 1991, p.53]

This sickeningly violent film, starring a bevy of rap stars, marks the feature debut of hot video director Hype Williams, and while there are hints of his trademark trippiness, this is basically an utterly joyless endeavor. [04 Nov 1998, p.E6]

Such an utter piece of fluff so conceptually barren it might as well be a music video.

Who's Harry Crumb? has a beginning bright enough to make you hope that John Candy might at last have his first good movie role since Splash. But no. Who's Harry Crumb? crumbles into yet another slack, witless misreading of what makes Candy an appealing performer. [03 Feb 1989, p.43]

Perhaps that is Roskam’s ultimate point: volition and individuality are illusory; only love and death matter. That truth comes through with somber clarity in the film’s eloquent coda, which almost makes up for the silliness that precedes it.

But this film, with its many cliches and borrowed substitutes for creativity, suggests his (Schroder) career in the boxing arena might have peaked with ''The Champ."

The Covenant is dopey, formulaic stuff for the Friday night fright crowd. Worse for them, it's never remotely scary.

Juggles so many stories and characters, nothing ever develops into more than a rough sketch.

Even if you’ve only seen one of these films, you won’t need to spend 156 minutes witnessing the rise of a madman whose actions never required any backstory in the first place.

By the time the film settles down to give us a few solid dramatic scenes, I appreciated the effort but had long since stopped caring.

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.

The best audiences can hope for is that they, too, get amnesia and forget they ever saw this movie.

What it is, distressingly, is a mess - a ragbag of promising ideas and failed narrative, of good acting and plain old bad filmmaking.

Starts off mildly ridiculous, ascends to the full-blown ludicrous, and finally sails boldly off the edge of the absolutely preposterous.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Beer Run is tonal haphazardness. Sometimes it’s meant to be funny — other times serious — other times even solemn. (Alternate title: “Chickie Learns About the Horrors of War.”) The few jokes that are clearly intentional tend to fall flat.

A Kiss Before Dying is another failed remake, never approaching the claustrophobic pressure of the far grittier and more highly charged 1956 version with Robert Wagner, Joanne Woodward and Mary Astor. [26 Apr 1991, p.72]

Cherry is three movies in one, none of them fresh, all of them overlong.

Four Christmases is essentially "Meet the Parents" quadrupled.

An erotic thriller. It is also an Atom Egoyan picture, which means any claims either to actual eroticism or conventional thrills are theoretical at best.

The most dispiriting thing about Anger Management is that its cameos seem like leftovers.

One could argue that ''Lock, Stock'' and Snatch are essentially the same movie - crime comedies marked by an outlandish visual style. Which raises the question of whether Ritchie has the range to do anything else.

So this is the little movie that caused the big fuss. And little it is, a dopey bro-com that piddles along delivering mild laughs until it turns overly, unamusingly bloody in the climactic scenes.

Blurs the line between black comedy and black hole.

Full of atmosphere and visuals, it's empty of anything that really matters.