Watching this comedy is like going out with an attractive blind date who runs out of conversation after a quarter of an hour.

If you want the cold, honest truth about "Space Jam," prepare yourself for the shock: It's average. It's broadly funny in spots, but without any edge. It'll make kids giggle, but it makes a minuscule effort to appeal to adults. Special effects are sometimes imaginative, sometimes just the same explosions and pratfalls Warners Bros. has done for half a century. [15 Nov 1996, p.1E]

Except for a surreal moment when Fat Albert meets the real Bill Cosby, who tells his cartoon creation he must go back into the television, nothing inventive occurs.

By the pseudo-shocking end, we're half-entertained by the dedicated cast and half-lulled to sleep by the dull, overfamiliar sounds they make.

Cuba Gooding Jr. lands on his behind more often than a one-legged figure skater, and the preschooler next to me giggled every time.

Andie MacDowell bursts out of her good-girl cocoon in Crush to become a bright, bad butterfly: drinking, smoking, flirting with Ecstasy, having moaning sex on a tombstone just minutes after the funeral of a friend.

All performances remain irrelevant in the face of such expensive, explosive combat and destruction, and there the film excels: You will feel blown back into your seat, starting 40 seconds into the story.

In the end, coincidence undoes Criminal.

For all its flashes of emotional honesty and mordant humor, is nonsense at its core.

Kingsley gets the film's one big emotional scene and makes it count.

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.