Opening with a wearying series of nasty and violent episodes attesting to Bill's predilection for solving problems by shooting at them, and his nearly comic indignation at having his hat touched (men have died at his hand for committing that transgression alone), the movie quickly establishes a pattern of bad decision-making on the part of the writer-director.

This movie is bad on a galactic scale.

Muddled futuristic thriller.

An infuriatingly indulgent piffle of adolescent wish-fulfillment.

My question is, why has director Costa-Gavras taken it upon himself to dissect American cultural foibles when he has so clearly proven himself unequipped for the job?

This is my idea of a nightmare.

You may have surmised that Americans have held the copyright on turning out awful movies about serious musicians (especially musicians with physical or mental afflictions), but along comes the high-gloss weepie.

What keeps coming to mind throughout The Jackal is that for what it cost to make this movie you could probably pay some nice hit man to eliminate everyone at Universal who thought making the movie would be a good idea, and still have enough left over to throw one of those hit man parties and have a really great time.

Painfully unfunny.

A complete misfire.

A downright dumb movie that, with its breathless pace, lack of character development and uninventive gags, might be torture for even the kids to sit through.

Dante's Peak expands the concept of badness in movies.

A slick, supercharged popcorn flick of the erstwhile Bruckheimer-Simpson brigade in which the only thing more shameful than the proceedings is a very well-paid male star assigned to make you less aware of that sucking sound.

One of the most self-in-dulgent, muddled, badly written, vague and pointless exercises in filmmaking I have ever had to sit through.

As movies about relic sex machines go, this one lacks mojo.

When Annabel Chong sits in front of Gough Lewis' camera and complains about her need to have one of those normal everyday lives, you want to tell her that having intercourse on camera with more than 200 men is probably not the way to get to normal.

The hiccupping inelegance of this movie's narrative and direction makes it impossible to empathize with or even really comprehend any of the characters.

The closest this movie comes to delivering any titillation are a few open-shirted shots of Grammer that display major chest fur. You know you're bored when you have to devise a comparative body hair study to amuse yourself.

The movie itself simply misses the mark.

Wesley Snipes runs around a lot shooting people in plotless film.

Baumbach is obviously a bright man, but this material is too thin for anything more than a slight New Yorker short story about thoughtful screw-ups.

While it may be true that in space no one can hear you scream, groaning should be a perfectly audible way of saying the intergalactic alien-buster Wing Commander sucks.

A lot of noise and nothing to justify it.

Schnabel can't decide whether he wants to tell a traditional rise-and-fall morality tale or make an art film. His attempt at telling Basquiat's story straightforwardly collapses under its own banality.

And once, just once, I'd love to see a teen flick that doesn't send out a message to young girls that to be acceptable, you have to conform. I liked the artist girl much better before.

As bad movies go, Gregg Araki's Nowhere is right up there with the best of them.

The sudden cranking of the volume that makes us jump, even if we're just watching a cow chew on its cud.

The best that can be said about this film is that it's watchable, and that's not the way it could or should be.