As a WWE superstar, Cena is a perfect casting choice for a larger-than-life character like the formerly imaginary Ricky. He rattles off jokes with the boundless energy of a man used to spending three nights a week catapulting himself across a ring, and he’s completely at ease as the absolute center of attention.

The film makes mind-boggling choices for an adaptation of a game series so inseparable from its obnoxiously rough-and-tumble tone, characters, and humor.

This hollow attempt to turn a provocative showpiece into a crowd-pleaser makes you wonder if the filmmakers are actively disdainful of the original.

Given that Mel Gibson makes little attempt to instill any sense of physicality to this dispiritingly paint-by-numbers affair, it becomes easy to understand the marketing of the film’s 4DX theatrical option as an act of overcompensation.

My Spay: The Eternal City is derailed by how readily it succumbs to the ludicrousness of a plot that generates stakes that are far too heavy for the threadbare structure to support.

In the end, Nicolas Cage can only do so much to bring this hastily assembled oater to life.

Late in this reboot, a character states “Nostalgia is overrated,” and it feels like an indictment of the film we’ve been watching. Far from making a case for the original I Know What You Did Last Summer as one with its own identity and a legacy worth turning over, Robinson’s update is so cynically made and self-indulgent that it will at least leave you respecting the workmanlike scare-making that director Jim Gillespie brought to the 1997 film.

As The Home trudges along until its inevitable rug-pull, its obnoxiously loud and incessant score tries to convince us of the sinisterness at play at the retirement home. And by the time the rubber finally hits the road well into the third act, the twist is aggravating not only because it’s so patently absurd, but because so little in the previous hour feels remotely connected to what occurs in the homestretch. All of the horrific imagery and supposed clues that came before are revealed to be signposts signifying nothing. Even the outbursts of violence in the climax do nothing but remind us just how empty and cynical the whole charade has been.

It seems unsure whether it wants to be a campy slice of macabre in the vein of Dexter and American Horror Story, where the religious imagery and bloodletting are played for both chills and thrills, or a genuine rumination on death, faith, and the morality of doing bad things to bad people.

Osgood Perkins mistakes abstruseness for surrealism, and an oppressive atmosphere for palpable tension.

The few glimpses we get of the supporting cast suggest a more exploratory film, but these strands only exist to be woven back into Philip’s formulaic journey of self-discovery.

The film struggles to bring its non-zombie characters to life.

In the Blink of an Eye feels less like a film than a commercial for life insurance that got out of hand, or perhaps more accurately one for the kind of hollow Silicon Valley tech optimism that has been thoroughly exposed as a sham by now.

The slower it moves, the more obvious One Spoon of Chocolate’s deficiencies become.

It feeds the warrior fantasies of adolescent boys with a testosterone-heavy tale of a war free of moral complications.

The story is a worthy one, but the film lacks any daring expressive touches that might have made it, at the very least, noteworthy.

It's that rare thing, a movie that clocks in under 90 minutes, but feels like an endurance test in every moment, at every plot concern, and every musical number.

Remarkable only in how brazenly it embraces the tired yet proven formula that these modern ghost tales deal in.

The only thing more narcissistically indulgent than the film's repugnant protagonists is Mark Pellington's iPod-scored, visually flashy, thoroughly hollow directorial celebration of them.

If the result is a movie that seems like a much slicker, more condensed, and speedier version of the Sandler comedies that have guaranteed his grandkids' retirement, count it as a blessing that it's over quickly. Not without pain, but quickly.

The lesson to learn from watching Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve, a predictably insufferable, self-congratulatory cash cow designed to be ingested and then happily discharged without a second thought by gullible moviegoers who just don't know any better, is that we live in a time without economic dignity, a time in which we must be ready to do just about anything for a paycheck.

Awesomeness seems to be the chief quality prized by both the film and its characters; all other considerations--like safety, property damage, and especially good taste--are secondary.

Any goodwill it boasts is terminally suppressed, buried beneath a layer of bullshit as thick as blubber.

The only thing that manages to outpace Underworld: Awakening's ineptitude is its utter soullessness.

To question where things went wrong feels somehow strange, as the project seems to have been ill-conceived from the very start.

The film consistently settles for the cheapest shock devices and the most shopworn totems of our current neo-gothic moment in the genre.

As film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once wrote, to paraphrase, art often blooms in the most hostile soil. No such luck here.

If the Adam Shankman film's debasement of its subject into campy kitsch is the unavoidable fate of all culturally dangerous art, that doesn't make it any less palatable.