If you really hate your kids, pack them off to this slapdash farce, whose only funny moment is the PC disclaimer at the end about the Disney company's humanist concern for blind people (which even literate toddlers will have trouble understanding anyway).

The plot somehow manages to be both hackneyed and convoluted.

The hokey dialogue and witless physical gags keep everything painful and hectoring.

It's hard to pinpoint where things go wrong.

This hopelessly redundant action gross-out aspires to a form of hip vacuousness--and may achieve it.

This excruciating sequel tries to squeeze a few more bucks from the "Spy Kids" espionage formula.

Flimsy transformation comedy.

Misguided version of one of the Bard's best comedies.

At its core this is just another piece of big-studio nothingness. The characters are so underwritten they barely qualify as types, and the movie is badly paced, bookended by high-ordnance action sequences but painfully static in the middle.

A cringe-inducing flop.

"Speed" made millions on mindless, empty thrills; this laborious sequel is just as mindless and empty but lacks the thrills.

An extravagant waste of resources.

Several graphically violent scenes of women and children in jeopardy make this, ultimately, beneath contempt.

Here suspense is abandoned, and Jason is on-screen so long you get sick of seeing him -- and sick of the poorly staged slasher-film tricks.

Tautly directed by David Slade, this drama probably offers more sadism than anyone could possibly want...The characters are absurd, but if you're up for this sort of thing, then surely you can con yourself into accepting them. Personally, I'd rather have this movie obliterated from my memory.

For every jab at hypocrisy in law enforcement or in the media's crime coverage...there's a scene's worth of uninflected scatology or misogyny.

Vacuous filmmaking of a very familiar kind.

What seems more problematic is the virtual exaltation of Dirty Harry vigilantism, the storm trooper mentality and behavior on Nolte's part that the film breezily takes for granted; if there's any irony about it, it's carefully designed to wash over the storm trooper types in the audience and not give offense to them--only to the rest of us.

Misshapen and obfuscating biopic.

A tedious, lamebrained horror movie, which begins with the promising premise of a haunted house in the suburbs (poltergeists in the barbecue pit?) and quickly degenerates into a display of pretentious camera angles by director Stuart Rosenberg.

Enter this diseased Lewis Carroll universe at your own risk.

Even the action sequences are poorly executed, with lots of choppy editing meant to conceal the fakery.

Wretched yuletide comedy.

Nothing to see here, keep moving.

Frenetic and self-conscious to the point of tedium.

Comes to life only when it reprises elements from the original movie.

This is a new form of obscenity that might be called suicide porn. It's not just the voyeuristic surveillance that's obscene, but the use of suicide footage as counterpoint to other stories as they're told. Steel shows no special insight into the subject, though even that couldn't justify such hideousness.

If you haven't lived until you've seen Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill duke it out in a vat full of red paint, here's your chance; personally, my idea of hell would be having to see this stinker again.