Too much of this lame comedy feels like it was written to satisfy a contract, with gags (like the business with the perpetually horny dog or the toddler who knows sign language) that are way beneath the talents of this cast.

The movie tends to lapse into soapy melodrama and heavy-handed preaching whenever possible, and the feel-good ending that appears out of nowhere essentially negates a lot of what has preceded it, adding one more moral to a movie already weighed down by life lessons.

The movie's as dumb as dirt, but in the early going the action is staged well. The best thing about Tango & Cash is the series of gags to which Stallone has allowed himself to be the target. [22 Dec 1989, p.G10]

Although a happy ending is preordained, at least Joe Forte's script takes the less-obvious route there.

As the character grows soft and sentimental, so does La Soga, and the film's edge is terminally dulled by an avalanche of cliches and schmaltz.

The relevant question is: does it rock? And the answer, unfortunately, is no.

It's a cheery, impossible fantasy.

Despite its contemporary-sounding anti-French cracks, could easily have been made 20 years ago.

A shrill and gaudy comedy about the quest for celebrity.

In I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, the night grows long while your eyelids grow heavy.

A lazy, self-satisfied piece of work -- a comedy made by people who think so highly of themselves, they assume they'll get a laugh just by showing up in front of the camera.

Maximum Overdrive is the classic botch. Good idea, nice effects, bad pacing, porous script, no punch...Too bad. As usual, the premise has promise. [26 July 1986, p.C1]

What were charming once -- the clumsiness of Uys' style and the crudeness of his effects -- now seem quite tired: After all, he had the budget this time, and he has had six years to learn how to do things. It's as if Uys never quite understood what made The Gods Must Be Crazy so enchanting. [13 Apr 1990, p.G5]

This Carrie becomes less involving as it goes along, ceding its emotional power to special effects and unconvincing gore, and culminating with a closing shot so lame and uninspired, it’s as if the filmmakers just gave up and called it a day.

This is one of the silliest plots since Disney cast Gus the mule as the star place-kicker for a hapless football team. Although it sounds like a whimsical throwback to Gus and another classic of the genre, The Absent Minded Professor, Rookie of the Year fails to connect. [09 Jul 1993, p.G4]

It is almost a prototypical action picture; there is never a moment when something isn't happening or about to happen, and the fact that most of the action makes no sense doesn't matter much when events move this fast. [27 Sep 1985, p.D7]

Something about the sequel, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, doesn't seem nearly as obnoxious as the original.

With an exciting way out, the audience would have gladly overlooked all the loose ends from earlier in the movie. But the way Hall plays it, he undermines the early style and intelligence of his all-black action movie, taking audiences for the wrong kind of ride in the end.

One shallow film, that quickly returns to where it started: Zero.

Merely adding an older generation of lovers to a love story does not make your romance one for the ages. Doesn’t even make it "The Notebook."

What you don’t expect is camp. The Counselor is more "Wild Things" than "No Country for Old Men", with which it shares a border town setting. But at least "Wild Things" knew what it was. The Counselor treats its material seriously and seems to have no idea it’s a joke that can’t even muster up a bit of smarty-pants Tarantino cleverness or energy.

The best thing you can say about Scooby-Doo is that Matthew Lillard makes a really, really good Shaggy.

Filmmaker Christopher Cain has turned a national tragedy into a teen romance, and not in a grand, entertaining, "Titanic" way.

A $100 million production of a 10-cent script, is so clunkily written, so bereft of any engaging ideas or emotions, you'd think De Palma would have sneered at it on first reading and passed

The explanation for all this mayhem eludes me, and even a lame last-minute twist isn't enough to cover the fact that Jigsaw ain't as clever as the movie thinks he is.

Maybe there's a good movie to be made about the affair between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a distant cousin. I wouldn't bet on it, and Hyde Park on Hudson isn't it in any case.

For all of 10 minutes, Gray Matters looks like it might have accomplished the impossible: uncovering a romantic-comedy scenario audiences haven't seen a million times before.

What we are not spared is the sort of trite movie that lacks the backbone of any good dysfunctional-family comedy: a thread of the universal amid the absurdity.