The year's least necessary and most unimaginative remake slogs half-heartedly to its pre-destined conclusion without making a ripple.

"Man" is like a sour, half-formed version of a TV sitcom full of dislikable, disconnected characters.

Should appeal to anyone who likes films as mushy and unsurprising as baby food.

When Allen revives his plodding "Manhattan Murder Mystery" as the even duller Scoop, I snore.

The movie is somewhat below average. The plot doesn't always hold together.

What comes from the mouth of Johnny Depp...not the crucial spark of wit or insight that could encourage us to spend two hours with this cruel bore.

Satire's funniest when it's true, but Rock exaggerates and mistimes too many jokes.

The film is a saggy, oddly mean-spirited takeoff of "Walk the Line."

An unmemorable, frenzied, characterless hodgepodge that delights the eyes while numbing the brain.

The shreds have vanished in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, which runs at that speed during its stunts but is utterly out of gas in every other way.

Isn't a bad movie, until John Woo remembers that he's John Woo and we remember that Ben Affleck is Ben Affleck.

M. Emmet Walsh and Elizabeth Franz enliven the film as a couple across the street...These wonderful old actors briefly raise the level of the picture to the kind of warm but honest drama it ought to have been.

The Girl Next Door is to "Risky Business" what near-beer is to beer. If you're desperate for a mild buzz, you might make it do.

At the center of the film, like a man trying to pull a donkey out of a peat bog, stands Craig: inexpressive, uninflected and obviously tired. Perhaps he’s trying to play a chap who never allows himself access to his emotions, for fear loved ones may be snatched away, but he just looks like an actor who wishes he could quit his job.

Has any movie this millennium had less reason to exist than First Daughter?

The sequel doesn't develop the characters, interject any warmth into its frenetic story or take us anywhere we haven't been.

Williamson deals mostly in cliches, as if high schoolers weren't smart enough to appreciate anything subtler.

Alas, this is one of those movies where a clever character must suddenly have an attack of doltishness for the plot to proceed, and Spader becomes the victim of bad writing. [27 Sept 1996, p.5E]

We don't need a discussion of plot in a review of a movie made from a video game, do we? Nor do we care whether the characters are complicated (no), the acting is sophisticated (no), the direction is competent (no) or the camerawork is clever (no).

Jokes don’t pay off at all or take so long to do so that they lose their snap.

Recycling is a good idea in principle, but certain products should be sent directly to a landfill without re-use. Be Cool, the feeble film follow-up to "Get Shorty," is one of them.

Quirkiness is as essential to a small indie film as beef stock to French onion soup. But if you don't have enough of any other ingredient, you end up with a watery, barely edible broth.

Like so many sequels, The Chronicles of Riddick demonstrates Hollywood's law of diminishing returns: Its quality is inversely proportional to its budget.

Feeble, vapid picture.

If you have a strong stomach, a weak sense of disbelief, an active interest in Denzel Washington or Angelina Jolie and a temporarily inactive brain, you may enjoy it awhile.

It's "Braveheart" without historical significance and "Passion" without spirituality, though it dabbles in both, and it represents as brazen an act of career suicide as I can recall from a star director. If he were a first-timer, he'd never work again.

Writer Guillermo Arriaga earns most of the blame. He played similar games with narrative in the vastly better "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," jumping back and forth in time to show relationships among subplots and characters. But "Burials" barely has one plot.

It's ploddingly directed, indifferently acted and insufficiently frightening.

A miler trying to run a marathon, a fair middleweight idea trying to deliver heavyweight thrills.

Director Richard Donner finds a few startling images for bloody battle scenes, but awful dialogue prevents the actors from giving performances of any depth.

Has the sex appeal of a Road Runner cartoon, one-tenth the laughs and equal plausibility.

Delivers more of what the original promised, with the crudity index up one notch and the humor index down quite a few.

What starts as a cute premise crashes faster than a skateboard with an oak branch shoved between its wheels.

Puts more miles on plot that was worn out long ago.

The "Puppetoonish" characters in Hoodwinked didn't bother me: They're primitive and inexpressive, but their personalities come through. In fact, the problem is that their personalities do come through: They're all wackily sarcastic, unfunny nonentities.

The outtakes prove Analyze That could have been even worse.

As in most cheap futuristic movies, everything is dark or illuminated by a drab bluish glow. The buildings look grubbily similar to each other, so every location has to be identified onscreen. Of course, that saves the audience the trouble of paying attention.

This movie is made by and for people who don't care about good storytelling.

Ambiguity can enrich a movie, but artists abdicate their responsibilities if they don't take a stance of any kind.

Without a philosophical payoff, without characters whose relationships resonate in our hearts, without explanations for situations that beg for explanations, what are we left with? To quote another great writer of battle scenes: "a tale full of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying -- nothing."

Allen's laziness is startling, even in so mechanical a filmmaker. He uses a monotonous narrator to tell us what the characters think and do, though he then shows them performing the actions that have just been described.

It begins as energetic, clichéd nonsense and ends as irritating, clichéd nonsense.

A Frankenstein's monster of a movie: clumsy, patched together from parts that don't align properly, desperate to be loved, destined to be chased by mobs with pitchforks - those will be the critics - until it stumbles into its grave.

Solace is especially frustrating when it moves down interesting paths, then stops.

It took four years to come up with this? Someone needed that long to assemble this patchy, recycled collection of gags about stinky butts, superfreaks, finger-wide blunts and racial cliches?

It's marginally possible that Nancy Drew is spoofing high school adventure movies, and I almost hope so. Otherwise, it's unwatchable on every level.

The best way to sit through Max Payne is by using minimal brain.

If they decided not to give us Camelot, did they have to leave us with so Camelittle?

Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe attempt light romantic comedy in A Good Year, and the results are as grindingly discordant as a punk band writing a suite of waltzes.

Flat as a Moravian cookie, flat as a sailor's wallet after a month in port, flat as the average European's impression of the Earth in A.D. 800.

I once said I'd watch Chiwetel Ejiofor act in any piece of disposable fluff, and now I have.

Movies can certainly be worse than bad sitcoms, and this is one of them.

Abbott, Petroni and director Michael Rymer do exploit the visual and aural cliches of vampire movies from the last 20 years: The creatures wear tattoos, shave their heads, listen to blistering rock and dress in black leather. For a band of societal outsiders, they're pathetically conformist.

Heavy-handed symbolism permeates the picture, down to the leading lady's name.

Cowardice and cliché - not a tasty combination.

As a film, it's flabby and utterly predictable.

Speed Racer is chaotic as a six-ring circus, gaudy as a transvestites convention and soullessly cute as a robot puppy.

As lame as a three-legged mule.

Naive but ambitious, it comes across as a "Battlestar Galactica" vetted by pacifists, "Clone Wars" neutered for Saturday morning kids' TV.

As a vegetarian, I'm grateful that Around the Bend -- an extended commercial for KFC passing itself off as a heartwarming family drama -- is a loser.

This isn't nitpicking. Every bit of the tale is as full of holes as a wool sweater at a moth convention, and Shyamalan telegraphs each potential surprise.

Chaplin's pathos was (at its best) touched with irony. Lane's isn't. [19 Jan 1990, p.68]

When Elle Woods watches "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" for inspiration in the middle of Legally Blonde 2, you have to admire the nerve of the people who made this comedy: "Smith" is to LB2 what jumbo jets are to ultralight gliders. But nerve is all they've got.

Rarely connects with reality.

Director Doug Liman and a trio of writers eventually forget the rules they set up and hurl combatants to places they could never have seen or even known about: Who'd willingly project himself into the middle of a Chechnyan war zone?

A mediocrity at any time, because of its implausible script and bland characters.

No, I don't recommend it. But it kills fewer brain cells than daytime talk shows. [5 Feb 1996]

It's a disconnected, implausible story that aims for a tone of magic realism and falls short on both counts.

Harsh Times contains exactly 30 seconds of novelty.

I don't know if the new movie is Smith's weakest. It's certainly his most disposable, a warmed-over hash of jokes that will have Mewes fans rolling with laughter and the rest of us rolling our eyes in disbelief.

The filmmakers' ineptitude is staggering.

Might have been funnier if it had been put together with more care.

The film seems almost intentionally bad in most ways, as if Gilliam were expressing a suicide wish for his directing career.

Once, for no reason, Franklin whirled the camera around 360 degrees while two people were having an ordinary conversation. I suspect he must have been as bored by then as I was.

The movie feels not only calculated but tired.

The rest of the film couldn’t convince a sixth-grader it might happen. CIA agents search a home for evidence but leave the front door unlocked and unguarded, so Devereaux sneaks in and knocks them out.

What do you get? A reboot of "The Lone Ranger” that metaphorically drags this noble story – and literally drags its title character – through a steaming heap of horse droppings.

It’s hard to stay connected to a disaster film where the biggest disaster is the script.

Totally underwhelming.

It's as French as a half-smoked Gauloise and, like a half-smoked Gauloise, it stinks.

Goes awry within moments and never gets on track. The scripters and director Harold Ramis have no idea whether to aim for cynical humor, film-noir romance or post-crime tension, so they miss all three targets completely.

"I didn't write this." In heaven, Graham Greene is mumbling those same words over and over right now.

A three-hour-and-10-minute exercise in slight characterization, pointlessly showy editing and vapid plotting.

Once again, something that might have been a faintly amusing sketch on "Saturday Night Live" -- maybe even a tolerable 30-minute short, had the writing been more clever -- gets tortured into the shape of a feature film.

You won't see a single joke here you haven't encountered before, all in funnier forms.

You may enjoy "Quest for Camelot" if you have no sense of animation history, no sense of movie musical history and no sense of mythical history, especially the Arthurian legend. Otherwise, you'll wish you could drink yourself under the Round Table. [15 May 1998, p.9E]

Even if we leave aside the obvious time travel paradoxes, we can have a good horse laugh at the rest of the plot's inanities.

Self-respecting filmgoers will find this a "Walk" to dismember.

Campion has no clue how to sustain suspense and no actress of the caliber of Holly Hunter, Nicole Kidman or Kate Winslet (her recent leading ladies) in the main role.

Messing may simply be one of those actresses who's the right size for TV and the wrong size for the big screen.

Like the Big E himself. It starts out fast, dangerous, sexy, confident, funny with an edge. It ends up confused, bloated, unable to leave the stage when it should.

Writer-director Reverge Anselmo has created a movie of ineptness so perfect and unified as to boggle the mind.

Studios can release movies even more insultingly dumb, crudely assembled and cheaply produced than this one, though such an achievement will require some effort.

Kilmer is adequate, though he's always more interesting when allowed to play a character with a dark side; Patterson's too squeaky-clean for Kilmer to exploit the most useful part of his range. [12 Oct 1996, p.4G]

Many movies require us to turn off our brains, and many rely on clichés and/or coincidences. It takes a special kind of shamelessness to do both, and Into the Storm has that in spades.

Affleck simply wasn't meant to play action heroes or tough guys. He's about as tough as tapioca pudding.

Designed to appeal to people who thought "She's All That" was too mentally demanding.

Its main feature is incessant, unimaginative profanity...Take out the cursing, and you're left with a plebeian drama about angry, aimless potheads, sloppily directed by the man who wrote it.