By the self-contradictory and ludicrous end, I had the mixed satisfaction of being proved right in my disappointment. (Di Pego wrote the equally silly "Instinct" and "Angel Eyes," so I can't say I was surprised.)

It's common in Hollywood to describe a disappointing film this way: "Well, it certainly looks great!"

When there's no dialogue, this film stays right in the pipeline. When characters open their mouths, it ends up in the tripeline.

Decent acting forestalls the inevitable collapse for a long time.

Remains as flat as the Texas plains.

Logan's so carried away by computerized magic that he forgets to make sense.

The story's sweet, however stale, and many performers have energy. But screenwriters Alonzo Brown and Kim Watson drain the reality out of it.

We don’t see his alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder after coming home, the decay of his marriage, the vengeful hatred that led him to strangle his captors in his nightmares. Nor do we see his conversion to Christianity after a 1949 Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles, an event he credited with saving his sanity, marriage and perhaps his life.

Adults will wish the movie were less simplistic, obvious, clumsily plotted and shallowly characterized. But what are adults doing in the theater at all?

An intermittently preposterous, drawn-out but sometimes entertaining story about an unstoppable ex-Marine.

Infamous, which mines almost the exact same ground as "Capote," comes up 300 days late and artistically close to bankruptcy.

Lil' Bow Wow deserves a better-made film than this pleasant, sloppily assembled fairy tale.

It's a mass of interchangeable moving images, none much more significant than the others, linked to a plot looser than a 2-year-old's shoelaces.

A well-intentioned but overlong Czech drama that comes apart completely in the last 20 minutes?

Though the movie's a shade shorter than the first two, it feels longer.

After concocting one tense crime at the beginning, the writers can't do any better than to imitate it later.

The writing is self-consciously literary in a way that probably worked better on the page.

M. Night Shyamalan has directed movies that are surprising, hokey, suspenseful, sentimental, clever, touching or cheesy. But until After Earth, he hadn’t made any that are dull from end to end.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, move over: Your dramatic replacement has arrived.

What makes the film watchable all the way through (and it is watchable, though never remarkable) is mostly the stunning scenery and the performance of Hopkins. [26 Sep 1997, p.9E]

The Coen brothers’ new movie, set in Hollywood in 1951, brings easy laughs but dissipates from memory moments later, like the cheesy films to which it pays homage – or, perhaps, mocks.

Characterizations are rudimentary, performances dull.

I was not disappointed by Dreamer, the most dishonest movie I've seen in a while. Nobody gets a fatal disease before the end credits, but every other clich? is exploited in this fabric of impossibilities, nonsense, stereotypes and shameless tear-jerking.

The new Dawn of the Dead moves along with speed and slick visual style, but it's soulless and anonymous as -- well, a shopping mall.

Any story from the "Patch Adams" team of director Tom Shadyac and writer Steve Oedekerk is bound to end up floating in a soup of moral homilies, and "Bruce" does.

There's nothing outstandingly good or bad about the film.

Granted, it's great action. Terrific special effects. Pulse-pounding pacing. But it's a case of diminishing returns. Salvation so keeps its characters at arm's length that after a while it really doesn't matter what happens to them.

A painfully honest film, yet it's also painfully slow, drawn-out and simplistic in too many spots.

Watching this is like sitting by a pinsetter at a bowling alley. That's too bad, because the picture had potential.

sSo pleasingly forgettable that I spent most of the movie mentally casting American actors for the inevitable remake.

I recommend “Batman v. Superman” to anyone who thought director Zack Snyder showed too much restraint in “300,” who felt “Man of Steel” whisked by too briefly or who wondered how Ben Affleck could be made to seem one of America’s most animated actors while clenching his jaw as tight as a Christmas nutcracker.

Diary rather sloppily blends melodrama and spiritual uplift with crass comedy, sometimes in the same scene.

It draws you into its grim and mysterious world through the first half of the movie, then falls apart like a house of cards in a hurricane.

Know how to tell if a war movie is mediocre? An outspoken bigot, usually a Southerner, abuses a patient member of an oppressed minority -- the Asian recruit, the African American or, in the case of Windtalkers, a pair of Navajo men from Arizona in his platoon.

Wanda Sykes and John Michael Higgins have energy as Evan's aides, and Jonah Hill (hot off "Knocked Up") gets laughs as a sycophantic researcher, but Graham has no chance to show what she can do.

Everything about this film, from the title to the metaphors, remains cloudy. And you can watch clouds only so long before you realize they don’t have any weight at all.

I just saw The Transporter 2 on the way home from the lobotomy clinic, and boy, is it enjoyable. What a difference a simple operation makes!

Oscar-winners Morgan Freeman and Melissa Leo turn up in cameo roles anyone could have played. Kosinski was smart to limit their screen time, because it’s awkward to have actors with weight and charisma hanging around those who lack both.

The overwrought White Oleander may be middling drama, but if it bears any resemblance to truth (which I doubt), it's a brutal indictment of the L.A. County Department of Social Services.

Gothika was supposed to provide proof that she (Berry) could carry a film as a leading lady, but it doesn't. That's not entirely her fault, since nobody can fetch a drink of water in a sieve.

The rest of us can pass this by, unless we're such fans of the actors - Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern and Peter Krause - that we'd watch them in anything.

It relies on short bursts of Lawrence's zaniness, punctuated by an occasional joke about stinking feet or vile breath. For his admirers, that will be plenty.

If we had a story we could believe, we'd be in stitches.

The stars have chemistry, which may be all that we can hope for in factory-line fluff. But why stack the deck so clumsily?

Brooks gives himself the last word, appearing onscreen for the first time amid chorus girls oozing PG-13 pulchritude. "Go home!" he says. "It's over!" Could he be referring to his career?

The arc of the 800-page novel, crammed into 130 minutes, becomes a line as flat as the heart monitor of a dead patient. A story that ought to possess the mad grandeur of an opera acquires the tedious regularity of soap opera.

A loosely woven crazy quilt of other, better movies.

The conversion to 3-D has left the movie looking grim and dim. Almost every scene, whether indoors by candlelight or upon the open ocean, seems awkwardly dark; competent 3-D effects don’t compensate for this distraction. Equally drab are the performances, except for Gleeson and Whishaw.

I rarely pinpoint the exact moment when a promising action movie turns into a pulpy, asinine mess, but I can do that with Total Recall.

The warm performances give the film momentum, but writer Audrey Wells and director Peter Chelsom (who chops dance sequences clumsily) often stumble.

The movie briefly suggests Viola is an incestuous psychotic.

As dry as a high school history book, solemn as a funeral service, humorless as a Politburo meeting, bloated as a waterlogged corpse and unbalanced as a bout between a debutante and a sumo wrestler.

Smith has called friend Ben Affleck his muse, and this picture is just as bland and superficially pleasant as its star.

RocknRolla is a copy of a copy of a valuable original, and you know how faint and unintelligible those can be.

This pretentious mediocrity from writer-director Gaspar Noe is "Taxi Driver" without depth or any humanizing of the main character. [25 Oct 1998, p.4F]

So here I am, trying to like The Purge because I’m drawn to its simple and horrific premise, and it’s treating me (and you) as if we have the IQs of lawn ornaments.

Affleck has two expressions, a smirk and a scowl. Bardem never changes expression at all: Whatever he’s saying comes out with a dispassionate, hangdog glumness. Perhaps he watched the daily rushes once too often.

Though the film sat in drydock for a year, partly so technicians could convert it to 3-D, it looks as dull as it sounds.

Doris Day will be 89 in two weeks, which makes her exactly half a century too old to play the lead in Admission. That’s a pity, as perhaps only she could have done it justice – if it had been made in 1958.

The audacious ending, though unjustified by what had come before, was clearly something mainstream Hollywood would not have tolerated. Yet the 90 minutes in between, a mass of symbols and improbabilities so great they provoke outright laughter, made me wonder whether aliens stole Bahrani’s brain.

It’s rare that a movie stops making sense before anyone speaks a line of intelligible dialogue, but The Wolverine is a rare movie.

Mighty Joe Young is based on the 1949 film of the same name, and it's nominally more aware of '90s concerns: destruction of the gorillas' habitats, illegal hunting, trade in animal body parts. On the other hand, it's no more enlightened about the intrinsic value of these clever, emotionally complex creatures. [25 Dec 1998, p.13E]

Schwarzenegger, weathered and ironic, strides through the film with old-fashioned authority. Except for Clarke, who walks an ambiguous line between heroism and sinister monomania, only Big Arnie leaves the slightest impression after the credits roll.

You can get all of this free on television any week, so why pay for it?

This film might have been daringly funny 10 years ago, even with its broadest elements intact. Now it's comfortable as old slippers and unthreatening as a sleeping kitten.

The hot comic du jour wants to startle us but is merely startlingly dull.

Passed as slowly as if I'd been sitting naked on an igloo, Formula 51 sank from quirky to jerky to utter turkey.

The worst thing about the picture is that the people involved all seem to realize it's generic.

We waited 10 years for a sequel to the movie version of "The X-Files" – and the best Chris Carter could do is The X-Files: I Want to Believe?

Epps emerges mostly unscathed, and Dutton gives an excellent performance; he's as able before the camera as he is inept behind it.

You cannot always judge movies by their titles, but you sometimes get good advice. The sequel Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, supplies its own five-word review.

Angelina Jolie is definitely worth her salt as an action hero, but Salt is never worth its Angelina Jolie.

Dragonheart is all dragon, no heart. [31 May 1996, p.3E]

Director David Gordon Green steers a clumsy course between crass humor and sudden drama.

See not only the original "Detective" but the Steve Martin-Bernadette Peters film "Pennies From Heaven." If you insist on giving Downey and company $8 instead, you'll be getting wooden nickels from Hell.

No movie this year will better embody Macbeth's description of life itself: "a tale ... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

How bad, really, could it be? I couldn't have guessed.

Martin, who plays Clouseau and wrote the script with Len Blum, has completely mishandled the character.

Souza and Shelton throw in all kinds of ridiculous devices they learned in second-year screenwriting class.

OK, so no plot, really.

If you get past the preposterous hypothesis at the start of Return to Me, you'll find a passably pleasant, utterly bland romantic comedy without a surprise to its 110 minutes.

You could dismiss it, as I do, as an impenetrable and insufferable ball of pseudo-philosophic twaddle.

The Truth About Charlie...is that this "Charade" remake is a lumpen bore.

What a riveting movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen might have been! And what a rickety mess it turned out to be when the people responsible lost faith in the origin of the material!

The final sad joke is this: Weitz took a wonderful story about the danger of severing a soul from its otherwise empty body and did that very thing to his source.

Visually compelling, relentlessly loud and so shallow you need just a fragment of your brain to follow it.

Speaking of sounding Southern, I have to admit that the accents didn't match, and half the actors couldn't even do accents. But since we all sound alike down here, that's no big deal.

Attaching Chris Rock to I Think I Love My Wife is like chaining a Kentucky Derby winner to the merry-go-round in a petting zoo. His humor is hobbled, his personality dulled, his energy depleted. Who's responsible for this lapse in judgment? Chris Rock.

The special effects excite at first but wear out their welcome.

Heavy on cheap, dirty humor (Gordie and Sean clean septic tanks for a living, a fact that is milked frequently for laughs), but it's never substantial enough to truly offend or delight.

The storytelling is inept and illogical.

I hope his life was less dull than the movie he's made from it.

De Niro wears a shamefaced look most of the time, as if doubly embarrassed: He agreed to a movie he knew was worthless, yet he's too lazy or indifferent to give us his best.

I expected Get Rich or Die Tryin' to be gritty, scary, maybe disturbing or thought-provoking. What I didn't realize was that it would be so dull that any other effect it could have made was wiped away.

Gosling's been better elsewhere but delivers an adequate performance. McGregor and Watts seem baffled most of the time, as well they might be. Forster keeps us from drifting off with inventive camerawork; in this case, that's like saying a hideous suit has well-stitched lapels.

It's blah. Worse than blah, actually, because it's so stupid.

Wilson brings low-wattage amiability to his part, as always. Hudson's mismatched with him but tries to set him afire.

Plays like some uninformed seventh-grader's view of gay men.