It isn't that nothing happens in Poolhall Junkies, it's that nothing interesting does.

Not so much a remake of a film as it is a remake of an overcooked performance--a case of ham imitating ham.

From its standard-issue action to its halfhearted dialogue and acting, that's one situation even two Schwarzeneggers aren't enough to solve.

What's especially disheartening is the large gap between what's on the screen and the significant, meaningful work its creators sincerely believe they've made.

Follows a leadenly predictable path that will be more than familiar to anyone who's seen a recent sports movie, or any Sandler movie.

Moves with the suffocating deliberateness of a river of molasses.

This is a movie for younger children -- they won't notice that the children deliver their lines with all the conviction of an airline flight boarding announcement.

Lacking noticeable energy or drive, its almost visceral distaste for dramatic momentum is puzzling, especially in a film about the black arts.

As forgettable as the humor is the film's predictable portrayal of adults as clueless, overbearing cretins.

Harlin's skill compensates for a lot of narrative preposterousness, even it is overmatched this time around.

Flashy production design can't save Soul Plane from crashing and burning in a debris field strewn with stereotypes and raunch.

Thinking too much about the contents will ruin what little pleasure there is in the experience.

Inventing the Abbotts is pointless soap opera, anecdotal and superficial, mixing sibling rivalry, class conflict and tragic romantic entanglements in a style that mimics fictional life in the '50s more than it illuminates what went on.

Noé;, with his Nietzsche-for-knuckleheads nihilism and extreme-cinema ambitions, clearly fancies himself a visionary, but mounting a camera on a roller coaster or putting a story into rewind doesn't make a film formally adventurous or interesting. Conceiving of a gay club as an antechamber to the inferno and sexualizing a woman's rape, however, do make it titillating.

There's nothing wrong with remakes, but as this movie amply proves, there's often nothing right about them, either

Parents and older siblings...may grow impatient with the uneven execution that weakens the genuine charm the film sporadically exhibits.

A decorative Italian soap opera with an asterisk for earnest aspirations. Its beautiful people say painful things to each other in gorgeous clothes, and though the film expects us to take their problems seriously, it's awfully hard to do so.

These guys have dumbed down a comic book.

If The Mexican proves anything, it's that eccentric features need a particularly delicate touch to be successful. With a film like this, how close you come doesn't matter: Off by a little is as debilitating as off by a lot.

The result is exposition overkill and a dragged-out finale that turns what should have been a Tear Duct Special into a deflating experience, making what worked in the book unacceptable on the screen.

Etched in acid, stoked by wrath, it is one of those big-ideas novels that fits perfectly in human hands, where it can be savored over time or wrestled with page by page. But big ideas don't always size down for movie screens.

Promising as it seems in theory, everything in this new version, like Lena Lamont's image in "Singin' In the Rain," falls apart as soon as the talking starts.

Phony choppers and a startling resemblance to Jon Voight aren't enough to transform Theron into Wuornos, and I didn't buy either the performance or the character for a second.

The endless gore and violence make the experience torturous -- and not just for the victims in the movie.

It's slick nonsense at best and for the first hour it's watchable. There's cheap entertainment to be had from a thriller in which two detectives are played by beauties as ravishing as Jolie and Martinez.

A fairly silly and ultra-gory schlocker/shocker.

Youthful audiences won't be attracted to a love story between two 54-year-olds in the first place, and mature audiences will be turned off by the language, not necessarily out of prudishness, but out of its sheer crassness.

The film is plagued by Anselmo's inability to focus on the heart of his story.

As for Schneider, he may be obnoxious and unhandsome, but he is, more important, talented and fearless, the driving force of this brash, not-so-predictable comedy.

The whole trippy experience is like being held at gunpoint by a Jehovah's Witness at the front door while George Gobel holds forth in the living room on Nickelodeon.

If they had to make things up, couldn't they have made up something smarter?

Niccol's script, which has the earnest simplicity of a freshman philosophy paper, is merely naked exploitation, a sci-fi snow job that projects a contemporary ethical question--would a perfect human be human?--into a solemn future where the worst-case scenario unfolds as conventional Hollywood melodrama.

At times awkward and under-inspired, creating a question as to whether so gloomy and repugnant a tale was worth telling simply for its own sake.

The film is loaded with striking visuals, high energy and all-stops portrayals from its actors, but for all of Samuell's imaginative cinematic bravura, it is, finally, mainly exasperating. Phooey on Julien and Sophie's excruciating l'amour fou.

The result is hit or miss, with a laugh here and there, ultimately creating an aura of hopeless and drawn-out improbability.

The South takes another beating in Sweet Home Alabama, but that's nothing compared with the one conferred on the sweetheart personality of its pint-sized Gen. Sherman.

Feels like detention -- without the possibility of recess.

While First Daughter is nowhere near as airheaded or disingenuous as "Chasing Liberty," it's far more confused.

Could be a tough go for those not already Scooby-Doo fans. It has a totally artificial quality, starting with Prinze's blond wig.

Once the filmmakers have got the celebrities settled into Stella Street, they have a hard time figuring out what to do with them. Stella Street is the road best not taken.

Feels like an acting exercise stretched to feature length.

The sort of noisy nonsense that Woo's earlier action movies made irrelevant, but alas not extinct.

Runaway Bride's Josann McGibbon & Sara Parriott script is so muddled and contrived, raising issues only to ignore them or throw them away, you wonder why so many people embraced it.

Mostly I Spy, with more dead spots than a Jerry Lewis telethon, is content to mark time. That gives us, and perhaps the cast as well, the opportunity to reflect on how satisfying this film could have been if anyone had thought it worth their while to provide real material for the talent to work with.

The thriller with a promising premise fails to deliver.

For all the soaring visual splendor of its past, present and future, it's hobbled by a murky plot that proves to be not all that original once it starts unraveling.

What is disturbing and frankly distasteful about The Girl Next Door is how slick and shameless it is in its eagerness to blur boundaries, to squeeze as much transgressive material as it can into a nominally bland and innocent form, to serve up a benign, sanitized and exquisitely titillating portrait of the world of pornography in the cozy sheep's clothing of a teenage movie.

Maxwell has populated his film with paragons rather than people. Worse, they talk and talk and talk; this film is in danger of talking itself to death before the Union and the Confederacy are able to decimate each other.

It's a drag how Nettelbeck sees working women -- or at least this working woman -- for whom she shows little understanding; there's a puritan, even punitive, cast to the way she sees her character, whose pathology she digs at with the tenacity of a truffle hound.

Though Waterworld has some haunting underwater visual moments, the film's impact is weakened by flat dialogue, an overemphasis on jokeyness and a plot that, despite all those screenwriters, does not satisfactorily hold together at any number of points.

Because no one involved with Starsky & Hutch actually seems to care about the movie, all Wilson can do is idle in neutral while Stiller frantically shifts gears, looking for an excuse to split.

LaPaglia, Feeney and Stoltz soldier bravely through an uninspired, airless script.

Unnecessary and silly.

Not even a sincere and heroic effort by Nicolas Cage can redeem the film's essential phoniness.

There's no doubt Sandler is talented, but if he persists in believing that, like Elvis, his presence alone covers a multitude of omissions and inconsistencies, he will squander his gift and make a series of forgettable films in the process.

Laborious in the unfolding of its plot, and under Sam Weisman's brash direction the unabashed amorality of the material is crass rather than sly in tone.

The script is muddled and unsatisfying, as ponderous on its feet as its protagonists are in their heavy diving suits.

A woeful little comedy that runs out of steam shortly after its opening sequence.

On paper it has every advantage, from gifted stars Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston to an established comedy writer-director with a promising idea about a romance between a carefree woman and a worried man. But instead of maximizing those pluses, Along Came Polly so completely fritters them away that even its brief 90 minutes feels unhappily long.

Like the song, the movie is bouncy and catchy but disposable pop material.

There's scarcely a whiff of originality in the zombie horror picture House of the Dead, but Uwe Boll has directed it with enough energy and style that it adds up to passably mindless if grisly fun.

Gallops along at a quick, easygoing clip. Grown-ups may have to scrub the sugar from their frontal lobes. But it's not about them, is it? Never was. Never will be.

In short, Vlad could have used a substantial transfusion of wit and energy, with a dash of dark humor.

Although decently acted and well-crafted, Thérèse is essentially an illustrated Sunday school lecture for true believers. It comes across as more an exercise in determined piety.

Complacent yet competent animation kids will enjoy despite its mundane nature.

Driven by different agendas, history and movies often tell two irreconcilable stories, which is why, despite some glints of talent, Hancock has given us yet another film and another Alamo to forget.

Manages to capture enough honest moments to make it watchable, but it's never really funny enough to recommend to anyone who's outgrown short pants and kneepads.

A thick and gooey slice of holiday hokum.

Has the makings of that rarest of ventures, an adaptation that is true to the spirit of the original as well as its own time and place. But as Payback wends its way toward its conclusion, its promise dissipates and its pleasures wane.

Revenge may be sweet, but this is one "Monte Cristo" that leaves a sour taste.

A tiresome addiction drama.

The film strains to be hip with its sterilized pop soundtrack and perky graphics. The humor that isn't lifted from the novel is equivalent to that of a subpar situation comedy.

Chintzy-looking gore-bore.

Limp spoof.

Nicholson's Joker will be the pivotal point for many. It's his energy, spurting like an artery, that keeps the picture alive; it's certainly not the special effects, the editing, which has no discernible rhythm, or the flaccid screenplay.

Hits hard and pulls no punches in telling its brutal story.

Features an aggressive, in-your-face romanticism that's noticeably lacking in genuine warmth. While its story of lonely misfits searching for love has appealing moments, more often it turns into an overbearing fable overburdened with fake joie de vivre.

There's an underlying emptiness to Human Traffic and it's difficult to say for sure whether Kerrigan fully acknowledges it.

The genre's recent past has set the bar quite high, and Treasure Planet doesn't quite make it over.

Jackpot has much that is sweet and funny, but it is not overly original--and it is overly long and not as coherent as it might be.

Something we want to like more than we can. It's a mild family film with an excellent cast that never develops traction.

Full of car chases, weak jokes and scenes so meandering they make "Saturday Night Live" look like a paragon of brevity and wit.

A technical amazement that points computer-generated animation toward the brightest of futures, it's also cartoonish in the worst way, the prisoner of pedestrian plot points and childish, too-cute dialogue.

It's the most outwardly sleazy of all Lynch's movies, the rawest and raunchiest, the least circumspect. Full of striptease and scandal, violence, orgy and feverish nightmare, the movie is a kind of mass opening of the sewers that always lay beneath Twin Peaks' placid streets... But it does cap off a pop-cultural landmark, with all the bad taste and high style required. [31 Aug 1992]

Aside from a couple of rescue set pieces that bookend it, the film is strictly low-wattage in terms of action.

Though amusing from moment to moment, is erratic, unfocused and uncertain where it's going.

An implement of destruction loaded with more borrowed film riffs than could be compiled by 47 clones of Robert Rodriguez..

This is the latest addition to a new type of drug movie -- one that exploits addiction for a lot of self-adoring showboating.

Listless, disjointed and disconnected, this meandering two-hour, 32-minute exercise in futility will fascinate no one who doesn't have a blood relation among the cast or crew.

While Yamamoto's bullets never miss, Kitano's attempt at tragic grandeur of "Godfather"-esque proportions misses to an almost embarrassing degree.

A routine sci-fi/horror action-adventure, takes us where we've been countless times before.

Scorsese and his team have created a heavy-footed golem of a motion picture, hard to ignore as it throws its weight around but fatally lacking in anything resembling soul.

The film's repetitious, episodic structure seems to unnecessarily alleviate the building tension, making it a far less frightening film than it might have been.

Depp's performance reminds us that, yeah, it's only a movie -- just not a good one.

More than anything, The Grudge suggests that it's time for Shimizu to move on.

All-out burlesque rather than spoof from the outset, the film becomes less and less amusing. Wayans has a wild zaniness that can be hilarious, but how many bodily function jokes, ultra-crude sexual innuendoes and quite a lot of men and women simply punching each other out can one movie endure?

Such unabashed ludicrousness can be fun, in a brainless sort of way, especially when it's coupled with lots of sudden defibrillator jolts underscored by crashing cymbals. If there's one thing The Forgotten has, it's plenty of cardiac moments.

A provocation, a coup de theatre and three hours of tedious experimentation.