It's shallow, it's silly, it's pat.

A frustrating combination of inspiration and routine, acuity and dullness, originality and fashion. Part web-of-life indie film, part troubled teen drama, part suburban satire, part comic book fantasy, it vacillates between the engaging and the silly, buoyed by energetic performances but pulled underwater by self-satisfied writing and direction.

It's pleasantly funny, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, from start to finish, even when it's staging broad, easy gags about baby barf and fat kids.

Worthless, tasteless and unfunny.

With a titanium body and a child's mind, Chappie is a fascinating figure, vividly rendered, enough so that you wish there was a better movie around him.

It's mostly full of schlock.

The whole thing has the feel of a fact-based dinner-table anecdote absurdly puffed up to feature length.

Sadly, director Jaume Serra has taken the Gothic premise of a madman casting his living victims in wax and, no doubt at the behest of copycat-hungry producers, turned House of Wax into yet another teens-versus-hillbillies slasher flick

Soggy.

An odd, jumbled, beautifully wrought, often confusing work, this animated feature manages to be a compelling, exhilarating experience.

While the plot of The Hunted is tiresome and the character development is phlegmatic, the picture holds fascination in its determination to trim away chat and guff and focus on tempo and filmic textures.

Clumsily animated feature; probably better as a video game than as a movie.

Takes its point -- our nation has an unhealthy obsession with beauty and physical perfection -- and uses it as a bludgeon.

Very few will remember it in a few months, which is probably just fine with the folks who made it.

If the behavior of the characters had been more recognizably human in its venality, and the film's perspective more ruthless, this custom-made compound might have worked.

Tired, clumsy and appallingly ugly to look at.

The result is a sepia-toned muddle.

A slick and exciting film

If all you care about is bang-bang, then Act of Valor should satisfy you. But if all you care about is bang-bang, then you're invalidating the very reason the actual SEALS appear in this film: to put a human face on their dangerous work.

Maybe you can skip the movie and just watch the credits.

The last half hour is full of plot twists, turns and pretzel bends. They are imaginative, occasionally funny, and they make some surprises truly surprising. But in the process they leave the last flickering glimmer of credibility back around Minute No. 61. [8 Feb 1992, p.C06]

For starters, everything's grimy and humorless in a way that infects even Aniston.

The film is shot (by Dan Lausten) with a credible creepiness, and it teems with clever touches. [17 Apr 1998]

There are bits of this film that titillate, undeniably, but mainly you wait for the comic to bring out the big guns, and then he leaves you feeling more teased than tickled.

Takes a fabulous idea and overplays it, making an average picture out of some truly extraordinary material.

It adds up to a truly taxing couple of hours: ham acting, visual noise, aural torture, elementary plotting and unconvincing emotions.

It's alternately mind-boggling and patience-testing, mixing astounding sequences of over-the-top invention with scenes of inept acting and indifferent filmmaking.

It's a movie that's races from no place to get nowhere.