The script has no nuance, none. And when Shyamalan moves into the director's chair, the script problems are magnified. Everything is spelled out, underlined in red.

There's certainly no moviegoing reanimation in director Stuart Beattie's adaptation of Kevin Grevioux's graphic novel.

What unfolds instead is a deadly dull trial and boatloads of speechifying about religious dignity, hate crimes and prejudice.

Perry's ongoing disinterest in improving as a filmmaker is now seemingly part of his unshakable belief in himself, his insistence on doing his thing his way.

This poor film is so shamelessly manipulative and hopelessly bogus it will make you bite your tongue in regret and despair.

The best of the Alex Cross mess suggests that as an actor, he has the talent to move beyond the world of Madea should he want to. He just needs to look for much better material.

Dark Tide, directed with hopelessly flagging energy by John Stockwell, barely musters up enough interest to be thuddingly bad.

The FP so desperately wants to be cultishly admired for its bad-taste rollout of wacko characters, ugly costumes and vulgar slang that it forgets to be genuinely offbeat or funny.

Lacking real kick, High School winds up as irksome as a bag of ditch weed and as lame as the pun of the film's title.

Grown Ups 2 looks like it was a lot of fun to make. And the last laugh is on us.

This 3-D spectacle is less the dance movie that's going to make b-boying cool again than a shill for sponsors' gear.

Chow is actually an apt metaphor for the movie - indescribably irritating and only in it for the money.

The patriot-packaged Last Ounce of Courage has been made with the conviction of true zealots, but also the competence of amateurs.

Vaguely misogynistic and defiantly paternalistic, the movie fails at nearly everything.

But unless you're a demolition-derby fetishist or a connoisseur of vehicular mayhem, none of that will buy you a thrill in this video game posing as a movie.

Without a human dimension to ground its construct, The Brass Teapot ultimately feels like an interminably stretched-out skit rather than a storybook lesson stained with blood and hurt.

McCarthy has not done himself or his reputation any favors with this original.

The storytelling, from a script by David Coggeshall, is at times nearly incoherent and relies too often on random scares.

Saving Lincoln feels amateurish, strange and beyond redress.

A predictable hodgepodge of uninteresting psychological cat-and-mouse, dimly lighted action.

This is Nancy Meyers territory, but leaden with passé observations about lovelorn women...and hardly ebullient as either oddball-pair comedy or housewife-revenge fantasy.

K-11 has the makings of a cult movie campfest but little of the authentic wit, edge or outré vision it would take to get there. What's left is a dreary jailhouse drama that somehow managed to imprison a few notable actors within its lurid walls.

The self-serious POV visual style has none of Brian DePalma's cheeky, unnerving and self-implicating virtuosity — it just reinforces how sick and dumb this whole feel-bad exercise in misogyny and dimestore pathology is.

The conceit grows more strained, its Talmudic potential unrealized, while the comedy never rises above bleh.

This mission, well intended as it may be, proves a no-go from the get-go.

If you admire Kellan Lutz's chiseled body, The Legend of Hercules does offer plenty of that in 3-D glory.

Lopez is a middling ringmaster of doom at best. But there's so little context to the litany of ugliness — some played for laughs, some meant to shock — that it's hard to discern where the entertainment value lies in any of this.

Neither the film, nor the film within the film, hold our attention. Bummer, Keanu.

Painfully lugubrious, any sting Copperhead might contain for its contrarian's view of history is undone by its wayward sense of storytelling.

The result is high school English crossed with "Waiting for Guffman," though the humor is largely accidental.

The film strands its archetypal characters in a featureless danger zone and gives them overly familiar dialogue borrowed from a dozen other B-movies.

It's not the worst idea for a revenge fantasy, but Jim's payback is so lacking in logic and reality, not to mention tension, that it proves more laughable than cathartic.

Like getting a half-dozen undercooked after-school specials at once, Quentin Lee's White Frog serves up a medley of messages and themes while generating no discernible dramatic heft.

The lowbrow comedy Lost and Found in Armenia so shamelessly wallows in its broad humor, silly contrivances and retrograde stereotypes it almost dares you to be annoyed. Mission accomplished.

It's a goofy, episodic trifle designed to induce swoons among the saccharine who coo every time they see a cute guy, or a baby, or a cute guy holding a baby while watching YouTube videos about how to change a diaper.

The pretentious, preposterous, dueling-dialect flameout called Killing Season has to stand as one of the biggest missed opportunities in iconic matchups.

If ever a movie signaled that the Quentin Tarantino copycat age of empty-headed wink-wink genre rehashing is still with us, Rushlights is that movie.

The heavily improvised flick ambles as slowly as a toddler rounding first base. Hopefully, Garlin's next movie bothers to include a plot and jokes, i.e. the essential building blocks of a comedy.

They've jacked this loud, lame shrieker of a movie up to the highest decibels, both aural and visual, and rammed it in our faces with almost numbing aplomb.

In the regrettably amateurish hands of writer-director Thomas Verrette, Ethan's journey toward the truth feels more like watching someone wandering through one of those pharmaceutical commercials with a laundry list of side effects.

Chappie is a movie about the evolution of artificial intelligence that's as dumb as a post. It also marks the continuing devolution of the work of director and co-writer Neill Blomkamp.

Once you look past the carnage, special effects and colossal locales, all you're left with is the supper show at Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament.

There are zero thrills — 3-D or otherwise — and, for all the nutty mayhem, the pacing drags.

The fact that Child and Shaw share writing and producing credits here almost assures it will be a self-aggrandizing puff piece.

There's certainly a profound and valuable documentary to be made about our eldest living senior citizens. Sadly, Walter: Lessons From the World's Oldest People isn't it.

Pulpy dross of surpassing dumbness, Charlie Countryman takes the blender approach to mixing dark adventure, doofus comedy and pie-eyed romance, but forgets to put the lid on when pulsed.

It is a series of free-associating non sequiturs underscored by nonillustrative graphics and an intrusive soundtrack.

Director Derek Hockenbrough's vision is bigger than his budget, and it shows.

Co-writer and director David Aarniokoski's clunky, crude blotch of prurience and bloodletting is too self-satisfied with its wink-wink naughtiness to be either fun-dumb or scary-sexy.

It mostly plays like a slapdash mockumentary crossed with a bad reality TV show.

Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club is a sitcom masquerading as a feature film... Too bad he didn't just spare us the awfulness of this flat and phony slices-of-life dramedy and go right to series, where half-hour bites might have helped mitigate the pain.

It's dispiriting enough that we're still getting movies about the cute side of mental illness, but to turn someone rendered childlike by abusive trauma into desirable girlfriend material — and sporting cast-off stripper attire to boot — is more than a little creepy.

The dreary, loud, amateurish horror-comedy A Fantastic Fear of Everything...isn’t terribly interested in logic. Or continuity. Or filmmaking acumen. Or, most glaringly, laughs.

The film's lack of momentum makes the pace stultifyingly slow, but it's the script's reliance on the musty Wise Indian trope that makes "Dancing" dead on arrival.

"Collision Course” is simply a perfunctory, watered-down entry in the series that feels like it should have been released on home video.

Cavemen writer-director Herschel Faber has sketched such a thin and unfunny look at L.A. singles, it should mark the death knell for movies about child-men on the make.

The ludicrous and bloody New Orleans melodrama Repentance offers the despairing sight of talented actors in full flounder.

An abject filmmaking lesson in the many ways to irk moviegoers: cardboard characters, dippy plotting, sentimental overkill and tortuous logic.

The exhausted mockumentary genre provides yet another reason for its demise in Authors Anonymous, a tenaciously unfunny comedy.

Little more than an 88-minute "it has a mind of its own" gag, Bad Johnson should have kept its premise in its pants.

The stars' banter is insipid and unfunny, the wacky shocks short out and, most unforgivably, the car chases are a snooze, filmed as a series of stationary close-ups and diced in the editing room until they suggest anything but movement.

If it only had a brain, a heart and the nerve.

War of the Worlds: Goliath is just a few cereal commercials shy of a pointlessly cartoon marathon — violent, messily drawn and lifelessly dragging.

Irrational camera work and editing render Southern Baptist Sissies more fitting for the theater merchandise stand than for theatrical distribution.

This unevenly acted yuckfest, which is as unsubtle as its title, has all the pizazz of a bad sitcom episode.

Everything we can gather seems to nullify any virtues we saw in the original film.

The movie doesn't even need five minutes to signal that it's already a goner.

None of it works, really, as either musical satire or genre Chex mix.

After catalogs so many clichés in the dysfunctional family at its center that the film could be taught in a screenwriting class as a lesson in what not to do.

There's simply nobody to care about in Among Ravens, even as a case study in unhappiness and delusion.

So unless you're a fan of yawn-worthy shootouts and showdowns, The Prince is a "Taken" retread hardly indicative of any special set of skills.

Like so many filmmaking wunderkinds who could have used a course in common sense, Glanz is technically assured but emotionally hollow.

Aside from the film's double-entendre title and typical slasher-movie poster, director Quist and screenwriter Ponickly have given us nothing to fear.

There's no ignoring the aggressive stupidity and crassness behind the whole enterprise.

I feel more qualified than usual to announce that Saban’s Power Rangers (Saban clearly never learned to share) is a witless and cobbled-together pile of junk, and I mean that not as an insult so much as an assurance of brand integrity.

In addition to flat visuals, logy pacing and lots of first-draft dialogue, "Bridge" plays host to such an uninspired — and uninspiring — circle of friends and lovers it's hard to invest in their mundane journeys.

A movie of such snowballing stupidity that it's a wonder the actors could keep straight faces while shooting it (outtakes, please!).

Hokey dialogue, a syrupy score, a corny use of slow motion and a slew of contrived or undercooked plot developments further sink a movie whose appeal may elude even die-hard romantics.

Director John Suits seems more concerned with plying eyeballs with creepy atmospherics, showy visual effects and sexy interludes than with propulsive pacing or roiling tension.

The script telegraphs things, but also often descends into incoherence. It tries to be too many things at once, and ends up being nothing.

Joyless and repetitive, Extraterrestrial is like getting cornered by a madman. You keep wondering, why is this movie shouting at me?

This time around the dramatics and dialogue are so laugh-out-loud funny that if there is a "4" — despite the promises that "3" is the final chapter — maybe it should be a straight-out satire.

Aside from too many characters and story strands, the dialogue is hackneyed and the acting subpar, starting with the movie's lead.

Emilio Mauro's screenplay is all rancid machismo, tedious yelling and turgid plotting, while director James Mottern exhibits a pathological love for repetitive close-ups and terrible acting that instantly brings each endlessly talky scene to a dead stop within seconds.

An unholy mess co-produced by Cameron's faith-based Camfam Studios.

This may not be the dumbest action picture of the year, but it's not for lack of trying. Insurmountable plot implausibilities, rampant racial stereotyping, superfluous nudity and inhuman amounts of comically exaggerated violence--"Kickboxer" has it all.

Inept on every level, Panic 5 Bravo is a virtually unwatchable, blood-soaked crime drama serving as the writing-directing debut of actor Kuno Becker.

Perhaps aware of how little its audience might pay attention to anything not running, fired off or blown up, the movie's characters explain themselves regularly. Willis, meanwhile, mutters his executive-suite-villain lines as if he's afraid of waking you.

The theatrical acting style doesn't translate here, and the film feels overdone yet amateurish. The cinematography is dim and dingy, and some shots don't make any sense. There's no reason for this story to be a musical and no reason to watch it unless you're a die-hard musical theater completist.

Writer-director Timothy L. Anderson mistakes foul language for wit, and the result is all painfully humorless.

The true mistreatment is directed toward the moviegoer, who has to endure enough stale pseudo-shocks, empty atmospherics, explanatory mumbo-jumbo and personality-free acting that it's hard not to think of viewing Dark Summer as running-time served.

Tiu finds absolutely nothing redeemable in Cissy's upbringing. Her wholesale rejection of her parents' values isn't the enlightenment filmmakers would have you believe; it's internalized racism — conditioned by a lifetime of exposure to stereotypical depictions and cultural colonialism — to think that Asians' heritage and culture necessarily deprive them of happiness and fulfillment.

As written, directed and played by Swartzwelder, Clay is such a self-absorbed, judgmental jerk that anyone who would willingly subject themselves to his endless pontificating could rival Anastasia Steele in the masochism department.

Treehouse is a lackluster backwoods thriller that takes far too long to get — well, not very far. There's more tension in a round of Final Jeopardy.

With Snyder-Starr producing the film, My Way impresses as an exercise in narcissism.

Even if you do manage to make sense of the plot, it still doesn't make the film any more watchable.

Between plot and character, there are definitely 18 holes in The Squeeze.

Quale and his crew clearly want this to be a good old-fashioned two-fisted caper, but the pacing is leaden and the plot lacks imagination. Worst of all, nobody really bothered to give the picture an angle. It’s all straight, flat and dull.