There are many reasons that 1999 is considered a banner year for American cinema. This attempt to revisit the type of fanciful, footloose and fancy-twee storytelling that helped characterize that cultural moment is a big swing, and an even bigger miss.

Slack direction fails to touch a nerve. Martin was scarier and funnier extracting Bill Murray's molars without Novocaine in "Little Shop of Horrors." Now that was one crazy dentist.

Retribution is not the worst of his thrillers/action movies — that honor belongs to either last year’s god-awful Blacklight or this freezer-burned turkey — but it does suggest that Neeson may want to consider retiring from the everyman action-hero beat for good. What once felt like a niche being expertly filled now resembles a formula beaten into submission, like so many nameless thugs threatening the safety of a tough guy’s offspring.

Affleck doesn’t sell it this time. He’s too busy going for the easy laugh. And so the supposed fun of the movie just doesn’t add up, like a long equation with a missing number.

What DePalma has never made is a dull movie. Until now.

Love may hurt, sure. But it’s not nearly as painful as being forced to watch a great actor stuck in a bad movie.

Judd is slumming again in ths lame suspense yarn that could barely pass as a TV quickie without the bankable names of Judd, Tommy Lee Jones and director Bruce Beresford.

Crossing "A Beautiful Mind" with "Sex Kittens Go to College," first-time director Stephen Gaghan (he wrote Traffic) causes a head-on collision.

Somehow, though, he made a movie that, to paraphrase an album from the director’s former musical endeavor, has seriously missed the Black Mark.

The dialogue starts at risible and descends from there.

There’s something incredibly deflating about all of this, from the waste of precious screen-talent resources to the sense that you’re watching the last gasp of an age-old formula. It is like staring at a bright, shiny epitaph for two hours.

Even if you view this as just another superhero movie, it still feels like a litter’s runt. We’d have been fine if this kingdom stayed lost.

It’s a disaster movie in more ways than one. Should you indeed look up, you may be surprised to find one A-list bomb of a movie, all inchoate rage and flailing limbs, falling right on top of you.

While we do not condone the excessive consumption of alcohol, or sneaking spirits and other such beverages into a theater, or any display of public intoxication, we also do not think you should endure Ambulance while being sober.

This is a movie that keeps going out of its way to be any kind of blockbuster except an actual Jurassic World movie.

It’s a bad movie, full stop. Which is a pity, because the pedigree looks great on paper.

An all pain, no gain, minimal-reprieve character study completely unaware of the ways its selling the singer short.

Thanksgiving is less a movie than a messy attempt to coast off an oldie-but-goodie one-off without adding anything to the party. It can 100 percent go stuff itself.

This isn’t really a biopic. This is the Passion of St. Michael, rendered with great fidelity to and emphasis on both Jackson’s undeniable suffering and equally undeniable talent.

The batshit bonkers Serenity fails on every level, first as entertainment and then as a new-agey thumbsucker about a magical, mystical tour through the subconscious. Serenity finds new definitions of bad that almost make the damn thing worth watching for its magnificent flameout.

There's a strong movie in this life, but writer-director Leon Ichaso ("Sugar Hill") hasn't found it.

This mumbo-jumbo plays like The X Files on Prozac. No wonder the actors look narcotized.

Even marking on a B-movie curve, Unhinged is running on empty.

How can you recreate the first Ziggy concert in 1972 at Borough Assembly Hall, Aylesbury, and fail to evoke even an ounce of the moment’s dynamism even when you have the moves down? Does Stardust exist solely to make Bohemian Rhapsody seem better by comparison? Why are we still watching this?

It is not only bludgeoningly nasty but also, viewed from a May 2021 standpoint, quite staggeringly un-prescient.

There’s an art to making action films, and that artistry is as AWOL here as it is in the first movie.

A stuffy, soggy slog of a movie that fails to generate sparks or a lick of dramatic sense.

Something vital definitely seems to have been lost in the translation, however, and what you’re left with is a retelling that feels deader than anything skulking around the shadows.