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.