Dumb.

Nowhere near the worst film of 2013, but it is definitely the most exhausting.

Earnest and well-intentioned, The Identical is based on a "what if" that straddles the line between ingenious and loopy.

The worst action movies, and this is one of them, are all about stretching out the action.

With Brightburn there’s not even the pretense of idealism. It’s a superhero movie with the soul of an ’80s slasher film.

The sequel is even more silly, and much less fun.

Mildly caustic, sentimental and slow.

Most of the cast doesn't know what to do with their shallow characterizations and lackluster dialogue. The best lines were harvested for the trailer - so if you've seen that, you've seen it all.

The Watchers just doesn’t connect on anything deeper than a surface level. Given material that isn’t about looking at the same boring thing over and over, Shyamalan might have been able to really make something.

Goodbye to Language seems like an appropriate title if it’s meant to suggest that logic and sanity have completely disappeared from this world.

A film with its heart in the right place. Unfortunately, its head is stuck so far in the clouds that it dissolves into preachy do- gooder mush.

The overall premise, involving mental illness and suicide, isn't all that funny, at least not in practice, and the picture begins to seem labored and long.

It's a perfect fit for Williams -- a hunk of slapstick, a dose of schmaltz -- and yet he can't save the film, which is overproduced, mechanical and resoundingly unfunny.

This is a movie that derives most of its suspense on whether a piece of paper will be signed, not a strong basis for dramatic tension. Here and there, we see moments of genuine emotion, but even then, it feels like we’ve been there, done that.

The movie plays more like a WB network teen drama than something audiences should be expected to pay to see.

The Bourne series ended with the last installment, and now comes a 135-minute death rattle called The Bourne Legacy. It's a peculiar movie, both over-plotted and under-plotted, encumbered by layers of detail and yet with no details invested in or developed.

May not be a very enjoyable movie, but at least the badness is in good taste.

It's all rather haphazard, and fans will wait in vain for Sheriff Harry S Truman, rich girl sexbomb Audrey Horne and the rest, or for more Cooper. Brief bits that avid viewers can understand will render the film incomprehensible to the new viewer. [29 Aug 1992]

Drama is as much about perspective as it is about events, and the angle provided by How I Live Now turns out to be self-defeating.

The ultimate failure of Jurassic World: Dominion is not only that it relies too much on action, but that the action is lousy.

It’s a pastiche of a pastiche, cycling through familiar tropes without adding anything to them; turning what could have been a fascinating critique of society’s superhero obsession into just another way of indulging it.

Has a vacant, inept, why-oh-why feeling from its opening minutes and only gets worse.

A half-baked script by Jacob Meszaros and Mya Stark admittedly gives Feig little to work with. But his young cast is capable of a lot more than is required of them in this so-called comedy.

Cute little fellow, but unfortunately, the film in which he stars is little more than catnip.

By the time we get to a kaiju-inspired third-act throwdown involving multiple giant sea monsters and a mystical trident, this story feels like it’s gotten too big for its small frame.

Sporadic on-field violence is only a tiny reason that Gracie disappoints, but it's indicative of the film's greater problem. Producers Elisabeth and Andrew Shue seem so intent on creating a hero out of the main character and villains out of almost everyone else, that they've completely distorted reality.

It seems Joris-Peyrafitte can’t decide what film he is making, and as a result we’re left with a jumbled mess with a slapped-together resolution that will satisfy no one.

A horror movie that has the distinction of not even being scary... Although Koontz wrote the screenplay, the suspense for which he is supposed to be famous doesn't translate to the screen.

What this film desperately needed was another element in the script, something besides love and sex. Maybe something about art, something that put the lovers on the same team and back into those appealing bohemian clubs. As it stands, love jones is a smart setting in search of a story.

The problem with Ready or Not is that directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (“V/H/S”) don’t know what kind of movie they want to make, or what to do with their heroine. There are constant shifts in tone — is it a comedy, like the trapped-in-a-mansion “Murder By Death”? A satire on the rich? A kick-ass revenge picture?

Works better as unintentional comedy than horror.

Although well intentioned, has the superficial gloss of a TV movie of the week.

There's not a single moment here in which Nixon is admirable, decisive or appealing. Nixon doesn't work as a drama, but with a little push it might have been a great comedy.

Trade is a total misfire, a strange attempt at making a buddy movie featuring a morose Kevin Kline and a 17-year-old Mexican boy looking for his kidnapped sister.

There might be a lot of guts scattered around in Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, but it's a completely gutless movie, without the wit to be a comedy or the nerve to stand on its own as a straight horror picture. It just floats around at its own dull pace, trying this out and that out, as it slowly sinks. [13 Jan 1990, p.C30]

Margaret Cho goes over the top in the new Netflix comedy Good on Paper, mugging and delivering lines too emphatically. But as the movie progresses, you see the San Francisco native’s approach not as overacting, but heroism. She appears to be trying to single-handedly breathe life into this nearly laugh-free movie.

This is the first Focker installment not directed by Jay Roach, who did a good job balancing the yuks with the more outrageous gross-outs. That comic-revolting parity shouldn't be much of a challenge for "American Pie's" Paul Weitz, and yet the skeevier bits aren't especially funny.

The action comes so fast and furious in Furious 7 that, for all the explosions and overturned cars and missiles fired on downtown Los Angeles, it becomes a dull muddle. Here and there, we get the imaginative and outrageous stunts this series is famous for, but mostly the movie plods along, muscling through without much life or spirit.

Faced with a story that doesn't make much sense, the filmmakers switch gears and try for a sociological statement - something about the marginalized and the neglected. This makes for a funny last five minutes, but sad, too, because Walker was better than this, even if his movies sometimes weren't.

Every so often he inflicts something like Irrational Man on the world, which is so awful you have to wonder if Allen wrote it himself or farmed it out to some look-alike cousin out to destroy him.

The To Do List is a romantic comedy with no romance and little comedy, but with an ugliness of spirit that's surprising and unrelenting.

How many doubts can Lee possibly cram into one motion picture? Red Hook Summer has almost too many to count: moments that go clunk, followed by others that go clang; actors who talk as if reading their lines off cue cards or rehearsing them for the first time; and set pieces that lie there.

The picture, which marks the debut of Mexican film maker Guillermo del Toro, is a dull hybrid - a ponderous art film crossed with a vampire story. [06 May 1994]

It's a romantic comedy with insights into sex and relationships that are old and obvious.

The whole thing runs about an hour too long: It should have been a TV show. The adventure's too big for the kids who would love it the most.

It's as if a trumped-up biopic of Andy Warhol were to appear titled "Soup.''

A dreary, distasteful exercise, "Off the Leash'' favors dogs over humans, framing canine high jinks with an ugly story of domestic abuse.

Jack is a warm, heartfelt disaster that shows that life is fleeting but movies can be very long indeed.

Sometimes the story just lies there like an old cat in the sun.

Hesher is about as awful as independent films get, a mix of ugliness and unearned sentiment, with a flat story, repellent and pathetic characters and dialogue that consists of lots of stammering and cursing.

110 minutes of Euro silliness mitigated only by the presence of Huppert and the striking ability of the actors to keep a straight face throughout this mess.

Way too serious for its own good. The best vampire movies are some combination of sexy, scary or campy. This one is 100 percent earnest, and the hazy mysteries taken from Rachel Klein's book aren't strong enough to keep the audience engaged.

The picture, for all its slickness and style, is empty, empty-headed and emotionally false… [It] has no more depth than "Pretty Woman" and occupies the same moral landscape. [5 Apr 1991, Daily Datebook, p.E11]

Works overtime for just a handful of chuckles and a few big yuks.

Ugly, gore-strewn and, ultimately, ridiculous.

A repellent, stupid film.

The Flash gets credit for effort, because this superhero movie isn’t trying to be stupid and convoluted. It gets there by accident.

It's a gorefest, a borefest and a snorefest.

A lamebrained guts-and-glory fiction. [20 July 1990, p.E1]

A good bio of any historical character has to have a compelling story, whether evil or good. Klimt appears to have had that story. I sure would have liked to know what it was.

The makers were clearly paying attention to the smaller details. But somehow, they missed all the big things that made the first Point Break a memorable escapist film of its time.

Misfires so severely that even the clever details get obliterated in the resulting mess.

Has that title going for it, which might annoy or provoke you. It makes me suspicious. It's the kind of flashy, meaningless title that's usually given to drab, pointless films.

In this case, the Big Apple has never looked so small and inconsequential.

The formula is tired, and it’s particularly sad to see Shazam! surrender so completely and pathetically to it, when it might have been DC Comics most human superhero franchise.

There's a lot of bad hair and incoherent, drug-addled remarks, but inside a minute we get the joke, and it isn't much.

Unfortunately, Sucka falls apart after the first half-hour. The action sequences are confusing and senseless. The setups for the action scenes are long and pointless. You know where the movie is heading, and there are no surprises along the way. It's one joke, over and over. [17 Feb 1989, p.E7]

Another dreadful, not-funny Owen Wilson movie, in which Wilson is the best thing.

The Losers is boring. It's predictable. It's so, so active, and yet so, so dead.

Devoid of thrills, and with nothing even vaguely frightening to distract moviegoers, it becomes clear that the story wasn't worth telling in the first place.

The Fourth War, which opened yesterday at the Alexandria, is about two knuckleheaded army officers, one American and one Russian. They deserve each other. We don't. [24 Mar 1990, p.C3]

Dirty Work was directed by Bob Saget, who always seemed slightly embarrassed by his enormous success as the host of America's Funniest Home Videos. Now he's got something else to be slightly embarrassed about.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is provocative and irritating — and intentionally so. That makes it particularly annoying, because even as you’re provoked and irritated, you are also aware that writer-director Radu Jude wanted you to feel that way.

Often frustrating and at times incomprehensible, the Bourne/Bond clone keeps the pulse racing but ultimately fails to satisfy.

Uninspired and only faintly funny.

The only surprise is that there are no surprises.

As a first-time director, Falcone has trouble maintaining a specific tone - the movie wobbles back and forth between sentimentality and silliness, sometimes even within the same scene.

A bleak, tedious enterprise, shot in earth tones and Gothic gray and blue.

Good for a few laughs but soon turns tiresome, veering incongruously between slapstick antics and mushy sentimentality.

This noir mystery is murkier than it needs to be, through no fault of Stallone's.

In between the scenes of folks being impaled, cut in half with swords and blasted with shotguns are moments of light comedy, but these moments don't succeed in lightening up the picture but rather make it seem as if it were made by Martians with only the vaguest notion of human sensibilities. [16 Mar 1990, p.E6]

Too predictable, but kids should like it.

Inside 10 minutes, at most 15, Be Kind Rewind reveals itself as an awful mess, and it only gets worse.

Not surprisingly, only Samuel L. Jackson seems fully to understand that he's in a bad movie, and he makes a virtue of it, using it as an excuse to hang loose, overact and ride the scenes for wherever they might go.

Going into Armageddon Time, I had no interest in James Gray’s childhood. But that was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was to have even less interest going out.

Despite its name, Puerto Ricans in Paris is less a fish-out-of-water comedy than a mild buddy-cop trifle: good natured and sometimes charming, but not enough for its thin premise to approach the magnifique.

To take such a subject and render it without focus, interest, or joy—to make a long, dull movie from it — qualified as some perverse sort of achievement.

Aside from being annoying, depressing and repulsive, Chaos Walking has a lot going for it. It’s directed by Doug Liman (“Go”) and takes place in a fully imagined other world. Plus, it stars Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, who are smart and watchable, and the movie does get better as it goes along.

A disgrace to the talents of Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy, but it's not enough just to say that. It's also a disgrace to the talents of Rene Russo and whoever drove the coffee truck to the set every day.

A resoundingly unlovable movie that almost resists being watched.

A thriller without thrills. It's also a thriller that cheats. The story is stretched to feature length only by having the film's incidents arranged in such a way as to reveal as little as possible.

An adventure in mediocrity that brings together some of the worst current techniques and trends.

Piles cliched character upon cliched character, and then doesn't give any of them very much to do.

Hoodlum is an overlong gangster movie, a bloated and often laughable attempt at an epic.

Dull and uninteresting.

It's as if there's a barrier between the viewer and the story that never comes down.

In his L.A. debut, director David Green seems to think that close-ups of Cage's big blue eyes substitute for suspense and drama. They don't. [25 May 1990, p.E5]

The verdict is sad but unavoidable. Poor Things is a 141-minute mistake.