Ultimately, the filmmakers build toward a reasonably satisfying "Twilight Zone" climax, only they crawl toward the ho-hum ending; the movie appears to have been written and edited in a swamp too.

When the movie works, it gleefully skewers the clichés of the buddy cop genre... When it doesn't work, it's exactly what it purports to be lampooning--a lame, boring cop buddy movie.

The result is something that feels very much like an overachieving made-for-TV movie--a history lesson dolled up like an action movie, with the action relegated to the final third, and even then, the battle is over before it really begins.

Funny and sort of creepy--a not bad little thriller with some peculiarly dated plot development.

Cox, bespectacled and deglamorized here, shows some acting ability, but by the time you get through this 78-minute bag of tricks, you could be suffering from a case of perceptual overload.

Unfortunately, the movie fails to fully make sense, which may be because it's based on a French novel (If Only It Were True by Marc Levy).

It's too turgid to awe the nonbelievers, too zealous to inspire and often too silly to take seriously, with its demonic hallucinations that look like escapees from a David Lynch film; I swear I couldn't find the devil carrying around a hairy-backed midget anywhere in the text I read.

Where are our Tracy/Hepburn screwball combos? Part of the appeal of "Wedding Crashers" was that Isla Fisher truly did have the comedic chops to match Vince Vaughn, and Just Friends suggests that Reynolds and Faris have potential greatness together too. Just not so much in this film.

The film is smart enough to aim for farce rather than whimsy or reality. The songs are still bland--"I hid the alarm clock," "too much lipstick"--but at least the characters are somewhat entertaining.

The dialogue is not merely tired but exhausted, as though its head has already hit the pillow and it's just "mm-hm"ing us before it falls asleep.

Unfortunately, Bullock and Affleck don't strike many sparks or produce many yuks…they're not exactly built for comedy.

The movie comes off as willfully eccentric when it should have been charmingly touching.

Helgeland makes a solid debut as director here, finding a new angle through which to view the Parker character, and doing so without exhausting the possibilities.

A strong contender for Worst Picture of All Time.

It's a kiddie comedy that really shouldn't be on the big screen at all; it has all the creative range of an Afterschool Special.

Not that there aren't funny moments in the film, but they're cobbled together so awkwardly that you'd never suspect the director had made a film before.

And so the chief complaint one can lodge against Lyne's film is central: It's not that funny. Which is another way of saying that, for all its controversy, it's not that daring.

It's all fairly brilliantly twisted, but it seems that series creator Don Mancini has utterly given up on scares -- there's only one decent shock toward the very end.

As ridiculous as it all is...it's somehow eminently watchable.

Writer-director Daniel Taplitz seems to be trying to invoke classic screwball with this convoluted setup, but it plays like mediocre sitcom.

By offering up the feel-good, MGM-styled musical version, a movie you can hum along to, his biopic serves only as a giant question mark; why bother if you're going to excise the interesting and naughty bits.

These guys are laugh-out-loud funny, not because they're being belittled, but because they're finally getting a chance to show a sense of humor onscreen.

If only the sum of this thunderously self-important "true story" outweighed its often fabulous parts, but it resorts to throwing up hollow icons in that most ignoble of losses, the expensive mediocrity.

This is fun for a while, but the ending is so ridiculous, and obvious, as to sully all the small joys that come before it.

Your individual tolerance for Jimmy Buffett music will determine how well all the scenes set to his music go down.

All in all, a respectable and predictable adaptation.

Kalvert and Goluboff overcome predictability by developing the film's characters and atmosphere instead. The result is a turbocharged ode to the lithe bodies and swaggering souls of boys who believe they're invincible - a glorious love song of youthful self-destructiveness.

The scenes involving just him (Carrey) are funny and full of life. All the other scenes are not.