It's an abysmal movie.

The futuristic thriller is overly familiar and never especially gripping -- and too somber and cerebral for the young action crowd -- but it looks terrific and is in no way an embarrassment.

The script (by Cheryl Edwards, who wrote "Save the Last Dance") is shallow and dumb, the conflict (success goes to Jackie's head) is especially unconvincing, and director Charles S. Dutton shamelessly allows his own small part (as Jackie's mentor) to hog the camera.

Holmes ably handles the starring role, but the handsome Bratt doesn't have enough material to cement his film career. The supporting cast is strong.

What results is a movie as vacuous as the characters on screen. It's not often a movie makes you yearn for the energy and half-baked artistry of "Freddy vs. Jason," but there you have it.

It lacks, despite the remarkable techno effects by wizard Stan Winston, originality and charisma.

For all the testosterone-driven soap opera, this entertainingly confused coming-of-age story is a seductive fantasy, a rare portrait of urban underworld machismo without the violence and the viciousness.

A B-movie goof on an A-minus budget, Returner is a mini-epic tweaked with computer effects and one blazing gun battle after another and set to an anonymous techno-beat.

There's a huge subplot that makes absolutely no sense at all and, in the end, the only thing the movie has going for it is Diesel's Neanderthal charm.

It's an agreeable comedy that makes its priorities clear: It wants to be funny at the expense of almost everything else.

The film gets snaps just by attempting the high road, and should be enjoyed by its target audience.

Director Jonathan Frakes keeps the tone just this side of tongue-in-cheek.

Best enjoyed by keeping in mind the latest cinematic proposition that apocalyptic disaster doesn't bring out the worst in people, only the stupidest.

The movie has a soul, and its good-natured charm may well win over the most cynical heart.

The unchecked enthusiasm of McGinley as the touchy-feely renovation guru gives slow-burn Cube the perfect foil and mellows the malicious comic tone. The rest is pure slapstick.

A thinker's film about the ever-shifting paradigm of man-woman relationships.

Even throwing in a spunky fight between female sidekicks (Gabrielle Union and Kelly Hu) isn't enough to float this film over clumsy dialogue and the feeling we've seen it before.

Would be totally unexceptional if not for its visual telling of the Apollo 11 flight and the fact that the movie is impressively shot - the first animated feature film in 3-D.

Campbell fans will get a kick out of it. The rest of the world will likely find this spoof a little too insular and indulgent.

It comes off as tedious, pretentious, self-indulgent, talky and so garbled it might have been improvised by the actors.

Taking on the sneeringly blase Alig may be a cagey career move for Culkin, but it's a disappointingly thin performance.

Ultimately, it's a surprisingly empty experience.

Who is Cletis Tout? Who cares?

Overly familiar, poorly cast and often annoyingly crude New York comedy that never finds its groove.

Imparts its fair share of laughs but bogs down after a solid start and never makes anything special out of its premise.

The result of this blender mash of exotic horror isn't much of anything at all, neither suspenseful, terrifying or inventively gory: Turistas is dead on arrival.

In Arcand's skilled hands, this sassy assembly comes together to be a comedy, a satire and a character study that's somehow not a bit condescending.

For genre fans, the horde-of-locust sequence may alone be worth the price of admission.

A first- or second-date flick, after which there can be some Cheesecake Factory and maybe a peck on the cheek, no harm done. What Happens in Vegas is pleasant enough for all of that (and it sidesteps all that "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" raunch).

A forgettable waste of time.

It plays like a big-budget, after-school special with a generous cast, who at times lift the material from its well-meaning clunkiness.

Mostly it's a series of dream-image clues scribbled out by juvenile seer Fanning, followed by super-powered smackdowns between agents and mercenaries with slangy titles like watchers, stitchers and sniffers.

It's never hugely engaging and it's instantly forgettable, but it has a certain goofy charm.

The result is an initially hilarious picture that grows perplexingly trite as screenwriter Peter Straughan transforms Young's sly observations into assembly-line pap.

Like many video games, Resident Evil has a drearily long setup, then a lot of blood and gore, then an overextended ending.

Not surprisingly, the best thing on the screen is Mirren.

Makes a serviceable summer shoot-'em-up, but it's surprisingly trashy and rather stupid, and its efforts toward being a gripping military drama in the Tom Clancy tradition are fairly pathetic.

It might be impressive as a made-for-DVD production, but coming from producer George Lucas, it makes for a cheap excuse for a big-screen spectacle.

The best thing -- maybe the only good thing -- about the expensive sci-fi movie, Jumper, is its high-concept premise, which gives its hero the power of teleporting himself anywhere on the globe in the blink of an eye: from the Coliseum of Rome to the North Pole.

T. M. Griffin's script is imaginative and clever.

Mehta's feisty, featherweight romantic comedy makes the case that even the most flamboyant cinematic conventions are as universal as they are exotic, especially when they conspire to produce that glow of happily ever after.

The film's technological selling point -- having a computer-animated Scooby in a mostly live-action world -- is strangely unimpressive. In fact, it's virtually unnoticeable: a testament perhaps to the audience's increasing knowledge that in today's CG-driven Hollywood, all movies are cartoons.

Takes itself seriously enough to pull off a clever bit of sleight of hand, but doesn't have much to offer once the twist comes out of hiding.

This retread has been bloated far beyond its B-movie origins, beefed up with more characters and an all-star cast, stripped of any real suspense and loaded down with music cuts and one-liners aimed at pleasing a crowd of rowdy male teenagers.

What saves the film is the chemistry between the two leads.

A rather dull movie.

A monstrous disappointment.

A redundancy, and a bore. The characters are harrowingly unsympathetic, the action sequences are by-the-numbers, and Carpenter's usual saving grace -- his sense of humor -- is nowhere in evidence.

Seeks to shock and to outrage, and so far it's done both quite nicely.

An uneasy mix that's too long, too confusing and too undramatically paced to be consistently gripping, and so blatantly panders to teenagers.

Harmless and thoroughly unmemorable: colorful, cute, fast paced, and about as involving as an amusement park ride.

Only Nam, in a pot-induced drawl, infuses the film with great comic timing.

If, like me, you haven't read this book, the movie makes little sense, and has zero inspirational kick. It's just a depressing parable about a fellow who sinks lower and lower in life until he figures out a nebulous new way to sell God to the masses.

The movie's one saving grace is Olyphant ("Live Free and Die Hard," HBO's "Deadwood"), whose sociopathic elegance is gradually winning, and whose dry, monotonic, Eastwood-like delivery of one-liners is frequently, if perhaps unintentionally, very funny.

Never comes alive.

There's nothing sophisticated or inventive about it, but Cube has fun with his characters and first-time director Marcus Raboy drives the film with enough momentum and energy to make the gags flow together almost like a real story. That's enough to carry it through another Friday.

Too much of the humor falls flat. Thomas' numerous chase sequences through the streets, over the rooftops and through the airways of Budapest seem numbingly repetitive, and the script's reliance on castration gags betrays its overall lack of imagination.

Not just a bad film, Hannibal Rising is downright dull, which is a far worse crime.

Here and there an inspired shot makes the film come alive, and at least three of its sequences had me positioned well on the edge of my seat.

Has a good cast, a nicely sustained mood of paranoia and several genuinely creepy moments, but ultimately ends up being one more highly formulaic teen screamer.

Fails to generate the elementary visceral thrills we've come to expect from science-fiction thrillers, let alone a compelling human drama.

Sadly, it's a disappointment. Nicole Kidman could hardly be more enchanting in the lead, but the script is one of writer-director Nora Ephron's weakest.

The writing here is truly dismal.

Though the pop idol recently said that movies are his ultimate goal, the best thing about On the Line is its music.

An unapologetic B-movie.

A fairly hypocritical exercise -- and one that's so flamboyant and overbearing that it comes perilously close to being a classic awful.

The special effects display is so lacking in imagination it turns into so much noise, just a flashy distraction from the stiff, stock cliches of the by-the-numbers script.

Director de Souza tries for a distinctive blend of exotic locations (Queensland, Thailand), big-budget explosion effects and a hallucinogenic style, but the mix ultimately turns out to be a recipe for tedium - and, though he tries, he can never quite give the movie the humor and flair that might have made it at least campy fun. [24 Dec 1994]

The new new new Jason Vorhees, played by Derek Mears in this Michael Bay-produced homage/update of the '80s slasher franchise, is a bit of a fox.

Before it runs completely out of creative steam in a disappointing final act, Celtic Pride flirts with being a surprisingly effective comedy about the phenomenon of sports obsession. [19 Apr 1996]

I'd be tempted to call the whole thing cartoonish, but that would be insulting to the real thing.

Doom may be by the numbers, with a roll call of colorful types systematically exterminated while The Rock entertains with cartoonish expressions and reactions (the closest the film comes to personality).

This is one of the most confusing, horribly written movies I've ever seen, and I'm the king of watching bad movies ... and liking them.

A credible action spectacular.

All processed sugar and artificial flavor, right down to the sticky but tasteless happy ending.

It’s a comedy, a romantic star vehicle, a thriller, a horror movie and a quasi-environmental parable that's calculated to appeal to all demographic groups. It's not enough of any one of these things to be particularly engaging.

Insipid, overcooked and dull.

Though it does present the facts of Susann's life, it skims them so quickly and with such glorious glee that we never get a sense of who this woman really was.

It's an original and rather clever premise, but first-time director Chris Koch doesn't do anything with it.

This is Epps' showcase. He can't cover all the film's flaws, but he'll sure gab your ear off trying.

This gory, ghoulishly funny horror goof is shameless fun in its own right.

What it doesn't have is a script that has anything original, cohesive, or, gasp -- funny -- to say.

A poorly written collection of comic-book movie cliches that offers nothing new to the genre, generates very little in the way of action thrills and plays like a self-important, humorless rip-off of "Kill Bill."

It's about as convincing as any other Arnie musclefest, but has a little too much resonance with real world events and ultimately comes off as insultingly simplistic.

A movie in which almost nothing works.

Since the expensive new movie version of the popular video game, Tomb Raider, is very true to its origins, it's a colossal bore.

An awkward and sometimes confused thing fraught with overwrought emotions and misguided ideals.

A preachy parable stylized with a touch of John Woo bullet ballet.

Most of Chasing Papi is a loud, frantic mess, a movie that wants to be a screwball farce but is simply farcical and screwy.

This week's excruciatingly dismal dating comedy. [8 March 1986]

Truly raunchy but it's more sweetly stupid and silly than anything.

As a director, Duchovny is in big trouble every frame of the way. His characters ring false, his scenes seem improperly motivated in a glaring way, and his distasteful obsession with imagery of unflushed cigarette butts bobbing in a toilet is beyond inexplicable.

Romano just doesn't have the stuff to bring off a role that requires a Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks. He's supposed to be overshadowed by his nemesis, of course, but Hackman chews him up and spits him out so effectively that the movie is glaringly lopsided.

Neither (Gooding nor Ulrich) has the distincitve spark of an action hero, and their Butch and Sundance repartee falls so consistently flat that you end up feeling a little embarrassed for them.

Cast and crew have a blast making a family movie that spoofs its James Bond-like premise, is jam-packed with action, sweaty-palm suspense and adventurous, high-tech fun effects, and yet never loses its at-the-core heart and sympathies.

Surprisingly, "North" fails most miserably on the level of children's parable. It has no solid emotional core to which an audience can relate: It doesn't touch the heart or come close to communicating a moral. It's just silly and trite and a colossal waste of time. [22 Jul 1994]

A family-friendly comedy with some gut-shaking chuckles and a heartwarming message. Sadly, it's also a fine example of what happens when talented people settle for utter mediocrity.

As far as these things go, the film's violence is not outrageously excessive.