There's certainly a thrill to watching a single woman lead a movie where she's chasing down criminals like an unstoppable killing machine. Is Kidnap inane? Totally. But fun? You bet.

The first half of the film setting up the characters’ meager backstories and conflicts is boring. The second half is livelier but dumber, with the kaiju rising yet again from the depths of the Pacific to rampage through some extremely computer-generated cityscapes. There isn’t a single second where anything involving the jaegers or the kaiju looks real.

It’s got more than its share of disturbing sequences, and a string of brutal murders. It’s also got surprisingly decent special effects for a movie that was surely made on a fraction of the budget of a DC Comics film. And it has a perfectly cast Jackson A. Dunn as Brandon.

I never would have thought I could get so little amusement out of a film where Hugo Weaving dramatically intones nonsense like “Prepare to ingest!”

In Snyder’s formulation, protecting the world from evil isn’t a gift or a calling; it’s a burden. And that feeling is reflected in the movie itself, a burdensome 150-minute slog about two men fighting over who is in the right when both are very clearly in the wrong.

Frankly, the original Mortal Kombat arcade game had a better sense of narrative momentum; at least there the fights progressed toward a final showdown with the big bosses. Without spoiling this Mortal Kombat, it mostly feels like a giant prologue to something else. Still, for sheer visual panache, intricate fight scenes, and the fact that it’s not an out-and-out embarrassment, Mortal Kombat rates very highly on the list of video game movies.

Hollywood has gotten so good at boiling down comics mythologies that it’s easy to forget how hard it can be to distill a sprawling adventure stretched across decades of stories into two entertaining hours. Bloodshot serves as a painful reminder of that fact.

If Angry Birds fully embraced its message, it could have been a refreshing surprise. But like the mindless video game that inspired it, there’s little here beyond fleeting satisfaction.

The whole movie hinges on Jean Grey, a character we hardly know (the Sophie Turner version was introduced in a minor role in X-Men: Apocalypse) and her relationships to a team of heroes we’ve hardly seen.

It takes the most popular G.I. Joe character and totally demystifies him until all that’s left is a blandly hunky dude with a sword.

Despite a rapidly escalating plot, The Circle lacks any momentum, a problem that’s only made worse by woefully underdeveloped characters delivering painfully earnest and stilted dialogue.

Given the visual and intellectual sophistication in the superhero movies Hollywood now churns out at a regular clip, Glass just doesn’t cut it.

In a world where the lacerating corporate filmmaking satire The Studio already exists, broad jokes about wacky animal trainers and ego-driven actors trying to influence their projects to benefit their own roles just won’t cut it.

The movie just doesn’t seem that interested in doing anything with them beyond polishing up some dusty IP for another shot at the mainstream.

With a cast this good and this likable, it’s hard to completely hate Office Christmas Party. Still, with a cast this good, it’s also hard to believe how consistently dull the film is.

Frankly, the whole movie industry could use more original ideas and fewer looks back to the past. But this one is entertaining enough that I’ll give it a pass. By a small margin, it’s probably the best I Know What You Did Last Summer ever.

This whimper of a farewell somehow feels right. It also feels like a mess — if an endearing one at times— that has been heavily reworked in the editing room.

The Da Vinci Code wasn’t Da Vinci, but it was an actual movie with texture and characters. Inferno is dumbed down to a shocking degree.

Like I said: Inconsistent.

Daddy’s Home is the white bread of family comedies, stuffed with everything you’ve seen before.

You can try to enjoy The Great Wall as a delightfully crappy blockbuster, but when you remember this is a Zhang Yimou film, it’s just a disappointment.

The most disappointing part of Reverse Panic Room is how little it exploits its high-concept premise after spending so much time establishing all the particulars of this fortified lake house.

Halloween Kills is a mess.

The movie cuts back and forth between the two, and their themes speak to one another in some ways, but the competing narratives barely intersect. At times, it seems as if director and co-writer George Clooney made a movie where separate but equal is not only the subtext but also the organizing principle.

A bloated action movie with occasional breaks in the monotony. It’s Perfectly Fine™; entirely competent but unexceptional in just about every way.

This is a blast of Bayhem so pure and unfiltered that when a detached human eyeball gets used as a “funny” prop during the first action sequence, it feels like Michael Bay declaring his intentions: This movie is going to blow your f—ing eyeballs out.

There could still be some cinematic potential in Black Adam, perhaps in contrasting his grim demeanor with the eternally sunny Shazam in some kind of crossover sequel. But this Black Adam was already a long time coming. And it wasn’t really worth the wait.

Why make a Venom movie (much less three of them) if the character will never get to meet Spider-Man? Beyond the fact that it is sort of fun to see Tom Hardy act like a weirdo, I don’t think Sony ever came up with a satisfying answer to that question.