The faux-doc foundation simply doesn’t work here.

The surrealism that dominates so much of Mr. Jones’ final stretch is admirably unusual, but it’s also confusing, and quickly becomes tedious.

Instead of trying for something truly outrageous or surreal—qualities that should flow naturally from the script’s insane premise—writer Jeff Tetreault and director Huck Botko opt for rom-com blandness from beginning to end, leaning hard on generic conventions even as they pretend to satirize them.

While discipline and self-control certainly figure into Ladouceur’s teachings, there’s also a passion and drive that’s totally absent from Caviezel’s performance. It’s not that the film needs any more goosing—it’s broad and shameless even by inspirational-sports-movie standards—but its basic lack of plausibility starts with him.

Ostensibly a lame treatise on how slippery self-image can be in the Internet age, the film ultimately reveals itself as a much lamer treatise on the evil sorcery of female sexuality.

Ultimately, the lackluster fight scenes are what make 14 Blades a disposable addition to the wu xia world.

The film aspires to educate as well as entertain, rattling off the names and relevant distinctions of various dinosaurs as they appear onscreen for the first time. But the overwhelming impression the film leaves is that dinosaur poop was enormous.

The movie’s style consists of tossing up a lot of heartbreaking medical stories next to a characterization of the industry as a mysterious monolith, and letting viewers finish the correlation in their heads. When it’s possible to use the same line of reasoning to push both truth and lies, different tactics are in order.

The movie plays out like an improbably plotted work of overly aggressive schmaltz.

Virtually nothing happens in the film that enhances viewers’ understanding of the situation. Winterbottom and company merely survey the scene, kick around a few half-assed moments of atmosphere and suspense, shrug their shoulders, and pack it in for the night.

Where Ted managed a respectable ratio of clever (or at least transcendently dumb) gags to lazy/offensive ones, Ted 2 is a repetitive, self-congratulatory slog, dragged down by a haphazard plot and the same third-act problems that ultimately sunk the first film.

Dracula Untold boldly attempts to retell the Dracula origin story by sinking its teeth into Bram Stoker’s novel and draining it of all the passion, sensuality, and ambience that have seduced readers and moviegoers since the turn of the 20th century.

Even at 86 minutes, with plenty of chases and action sequences thrown in, The Nut Job feels overstretched and arbitrary.

The movie offers more of the same, only more: more T&A, more conspicuous consumption, more cameos, more Jeremy Piven yelling, and significantly more Mark Cuban than anyone outside the city of Dallas needs to see.

What’s left in the absence of McCarthy’s prose is a sincere but fundamentally pointless ode to a madman, which does little more than invite viewers to gawk at the unspeakable.

At least White summons the camp energy that Lake Placid is fecklessly seeking.

For all the scary refrigeration on view, this is a concept that’s long since gone stale.

Even Tyler Perry seems bored and exhausted by his own shtick. To its credit or detriment, Single Moms Club cannot muster up the energy to be as insulting and offensive as Perry’s previous two films.

Hit By Lightning might have worked as black comedy, but Blitt clearly lacks any instinct for genuine darkness.

Pettyfer and Wilde look the parts, but any scenes asking them to emote quickly turn disastrous.

Strange Magic certainly isn’t an ordinary sort of mess, and the personal nature of the project is still evident in the finished film.

Writer-director-star Luke Moran has his heart in the right place, and a clear compassion for soldiers thrust into impossible situations with no training, but he lacks the desire to steer his film in the honest direction this topic requires.

Underdogs isn’t painful to sit through—the silver lining to well-worn clichés is their comforting coziness—but its antipathy to risk, even if that only meant straying momentarily from the path of least resistance, is more dispiriting than outright awfulness would be.

Though Dorff isn’t the only thing wrong with Zaytoun, he is still its biggest liability, and the rare case where one miscast role ruins a film’s essential premise.

When the film doesn’t strain for twinkly enlightenment, it stoops to find the easiest possible joke.

That My Lucky Star isn’t serious is less an issue than the fact that its comedic action is so broad, ridiculous, and predictable that it soon feels juvenile, akin to a training-wheels variation on various genre formulas.

A heavy-breathing, narrowly focused outrage-generator about a corruption case that both the court of public opinion and the actual court system have already agreed was outrageous.

Old Fashioned fails in more banal ways, too. It’s a flatly predictable sort of romance; numerous leaves are turned over, both figuratively and literally. The film’s predilection for screamingly obvious symbols gets old fast.