Here's what is bad: this movie.

In actuality, it's silly fun custom-tailored for reluctant young fathers and that entire clan of 20-something man-children who still read comic books and play video games, guys who do everything possible to resist the notion of adult responsibility.

Shyamalan takes the beloved Nickelodeon anime series -- the full title was Avatar: The Last Airbender -- and turns it into 103 minutes of overproduced, stilted nonsense.

If you can summon up the resolve to search, there is not a single honest moment in all of Whatever It Takes.

She's Out of Control is too insipid to take. [15 Apr 1989, p.E5]

The movie is a lowbrow showcase for an equally lowbrow comedian, and how much of it you can endure depends entirely on how you feel about Kattan.

Routine chop-sock of the non-Hong Kong school. [04 Sep 1985, p.D5]

Charmless and grating and immediately forgettable.

Skip the movie and pick up the videos at Toys R Us.

Nostalgia is part of the modest charm of this disposable but inoffensive picture. Old Dogs makes old dogs out of all of us.

The few bright spots in Oxford Blues, including the handsome cinematography, are like the raisins in the tapioca: They just don't help. [24 Aug 1984, p.C10]

It’s bad enough to make you look askance at Salma Hayek, Maria Bello, and Maya Rudolph, all of whom deserve a chance to do something funny other than pose as wives exuding various degrees of sexiness.

Gummo isn't so much a movie as it is an experiment, and, taken on those terms, it is a fascinating piece of work. Repellent, disgusting and ugly, yes -- but still fascinating. [23 Jan. 1998, p.5G]

It's still quite sexy, but hardly erotic. The director, Zalman King, not only has seen entirely too many in the goofy Emmanuelle series, he appears not to know just how stupid those movies are and so has made little more than a knock-off of them. [4 May 1990, p.13]

Somebody at 20th Century-Fox should have had the decency to deep-six The Pirate Movie. It stinks, but it's first. The Pirate Movie's sole accomplishment is making it to the screen before Universal's The Pirates of Penzance, thus poisoning the well for the real thing. [7 Aug 1982, p.C4]

Sometimes it seems as though Hollywood can't make a decent action movie anymore. Now that's a thought to make you go ballistic.

Bad enough to make even James Gandolfini and Catherine O'Hara seem dull.

B-movie king Charles Bronson, whose long association with Cannon Films has set all-time lows in the idiotic, hits rock bottom in Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects. [03 Feb 1989, p.C5]

Gigli's awfulness is of a rarer, more precious variety. It's the sort of bizarre, ill-conceived picture you can't believe exists, but are secretly glad it does.

The jokes? Passing gas, large breasts, schoolyard double entendre -- the usual run of recess humor. On the faces of most of the cast, one can clearly read despair, occasionally even irritation. They know: If you're much over 10, Police Academy 5 isn't going to keep you awake. [23 March 1988, p.C7]

The fact that Swept Away got made at all implies there simply is no dissuading Madonna from her movie-star aspirations. Her tenacity is admirable, but it's also block-headed.

Downright terrible: impossible to enjoy, impossible to believe.

Hogan could actually hold his own in a supporting role in an action-oriented flick, but his casting here has all the subtlety of a WWF Wrestling match. Mr. Nanny, which runs a scant 85 minutes but feels far longer, has no business on the big screen and should prove encouraging to aspiring filmmakers: If somebody paid money to make this thing, they'll pay to make anything. [12 Oct 1993, p.E7]

Not that the film is so horrendously offensive -- it's almost, and I hesitate to say this, too stupid to provoke insult -- but it's juvenile enough to suck a few IQ points out of any audience member with a brain cell.

One national group for the blind protested Mr. Magoo as insensitive. Magoo's nearsightedness does play a part in the humor, but it seems mainly a manifestation of his kindly but naturally oblivious nature. There's not a cruel joke in this movie.[25 Dec 1997, p.5F]

The combination of slack script and coasting star is invariably lethal, and since Blue City doesn't aim very high to begin with, the disaster is complete. Even the gunfights are staged ineptly, and the picture's one big action sequence is so telegraphed that during a preview showing, when Nelson's character finally tumbled to what was going on and muttered, "It's a setup," the audience hooted happily in derision. [3 May 1986, p.D1]

This misguided gangster rap movie had every strike against it from the start.

At heart, it is a Saturday- morning cartoon; the film might in fact have looked better as an animated feature. [30 Jun 1982, p.C6]