Makes no effort to learn about the culture. It idolizes the idea of spiritual purity without offering any insight into what it really means.

Exploitive while it pretends to be empathetic.

Upbeat but generic songs (one performed by Little Richard) and jazz lines add a little energy but the film feels less like a feature than an expensive ad for the upcoming video.

An innocuous waste-of-time.

So bloated, self-righteous and exploitative, it's hard to imagine anyone staying to the end, much less demanding a sequel.

It's hard to imagine how the movie year could possibly produce a more annoyingly stupid movie. It's so witless, broadly played and insulting to anyone's intelligence that it's almost as offensive, in its own way, as "Jackass: The Movie."

The dismal high school comedy Charlie Bartlett has the look, feel and sentiment of a made-for-video cheapie that might have been grudgingly whipped together by Robert Downey Jr. as some sort of court-ordered community service project for his many drug busts.

Where "The Cat" book was anarchistic but ultimately sweet-spirited, this movie is ugly, dumb and colossally mean-spirited.

Falls disastrously flat.

It should have been a cut above the usual teen comedy. But it touches the same old bases in the same old dumb ways.

An excruciating rehash that has virtually none of the wit and charm of the original.

A one-joke, one-note turkey.

Perhaps worst of all, this film seems to assume its teen viewers are a bunch of drooling half-wits, going to great pains to explain everything in so much after-school-special detail.

Welcome to the tawdry end of paradise, where no melodrama is too obvious and no conflict too contrived.

Afraid to pitch into farce, yet only half-hearted in its spy mechanics, All the Queen's Men is finally just one long drag.

It is a foul-mouthed British underworld comedy so they may be hoping it will attract the hip audience of films like "Snatch" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

A pathetic sports comedy that aspires to be a college-football version of "Major League" and doesn't even get close. [27 Sept 1991]

It's so sloppy that the flashback montage includes clips from scenes that were cut from the film!

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 unimaginative, mean-spirited affair that makes you hate yourself for laughing at it, and it's so devoid of anything close to wit, subtlety or sophistication that it stands as damning evidence that Hollywood has surrendered wholesale to stupidity and crassness.

A sleazy, uninspired, pathetically unfunny sex farce.

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

The film's one saving grace is Ledger (Mel Gibson's son in "The Patriot").

The actors, all unprofessional with the exception of Kim Chan as the Zen master, step on each other's clipped lines so regularly that it becomes a stylistic affectation, like Mamet directing Beckett.

The most ridiculous period film since rappers took on the Old West in "Posse."

It has the low-budget look and feel of an indie dating comedy -- and not a very good one at that.

The script and direction by Irish filmmaker Mary McGuckian is just deadly.

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.