In the hands of Preston Sturges, this could have been the basis for some snappy mordant comedy, but Stephen Herek (Mr. Holland's Opus) sees only fields of corn, winding up with one of those pseudodeep stories (e.g. American Beauty) that Hollywood takes for spiritual.

By ordinary movie standards it's awful, but fans of cinematic dementia should have fun for about half an hour.

Director Bruce McCulloch, an alumnus of the Canadian TV show "The Kids in the Hall," lacks the sense of scale and timing needed for a feature film, and Lee's voice-over about fate that brackets the narrative only highlights its shapelessness.

Offers the same crudely effective variation on the hatred and fear of hillbillies in "Deliverance."

When nostalgia, hypocrisy, and indifference to history converge in the kind of shameless Capracorn manufactured here, one can either be stupefied by the filmmakers' cynicism or fall for the package hook, line, and sinker.

Directors Gerard Ungerman and Audrey Brohy don't provide much analysis, instead telling the familiar stories of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Even with the bar lowered, this seems appallingly bad, a lazy assortment of weak punch lines, sentimental music cues, and trite situations.

There's so little urgency to the plot that one eventually feels not even the actors and filmmakers believe for a second in what's going on.

The serious Catholic themes that made the original film genuinely disturbing have been flattened out into a cartoonish backstory.

No laughs here, just the dull ache of seeing Heder slotted into a standard piece of Hollywood twaddle.

Cuba Gooding Jr. is the kind of guy who does ten minutes of shtick every time the little light in the fridge comes on, and for years I've been waiting for him to just go away. If this dud comedy is any indication of the scripts he's getting, I may not have to wait much longer.

Schmaltzy comedy.

Writer-director Howard McCain bids fair to dethrone Uwe Boll as the king of crap action flicks, and every second feels like time on the cross.

The indifference of the proceedings and the hero's slapstick behavior to the everyday realities of the camps borders on the nauseating.

The whole thing becomes a very rickety and contrived tearjerker.

Costner has an uncanny aptitude for gravitating toward the dopiest projects in sight, but this time he's outdone himself.

An extravagant mess.

Seems like a miscalculation on multiple levels.

Failed romantic comedy.

But it's also Howard's and his audience's misfortune that a good time can be had by all only if nothing of substance gets said.

The witty title aside, this is a miserably dull exercise in stingy-Jew humor and post-Jarmusch nonreaction.

Until the diverting special effects take center stage, this story, about an alien intelligence that builds an army out of flesh and metal, pathetically exploits genre conventions without generating self-reference, camp, or thrills.

It's clear that writer Akiva Goldsman and director Joel Schumacher are bereft of ideas and using the MTV clutter as a cover-up.

Almost no plot here and even less character--just a lot of pretexts for S-M imagery, Catholic decor, gobs of gore, and the usual designer schizophrenia.

Those who deem the gentle comedies of Christopher Guest (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show) cruel to showbiz dreamers should be subjected to this ugliness.

Offers so much frenetic fast cutting to so little purpose that it becomes an ordeal.

This mildly moody SF thriller belabors standard dramatic conceits involving jealousy and sexual betrayal.

The results are flat-out tedious.