Obviously a great respecter of rules, John Badham directs with a metronome, here some glossy action, there some witless banter, dispensing the two like different colored Smarties popped from the box. The bird in Bird On A Wire is a turkey. [19 May 1990]

Don't abandon Abandon. In the movies' long weekly line-up, it stands apart -- innocent of banality, and guilty of nothing more damning than intelligent effort that falls a tad short.

The monster isn't very interesting (or scary) to look at: he's just an oily, overgrown gremlin.

Inspector Gadget may be a live-action movie, but at its heart it's more cartoonish than most cartoons.

The fun of Biker Boyz should be in the racing, and though director Reggie Rock Bythewood throws around a lot of techniques, nothing really ignites.

A paint-by-numbers vigilante movie with the usual rogue cop, murdered wife and trail of vengeance.

A kind of dumbed-down, souped-up action thriller in a quasi-"Lethal Weapon" mode.

A quirkily efficient genre exercise that knows exactly where and when to administer its cattle-prod shivers.

How bad does a film have to be to get the death doughnut? Disgracefully bad.

If it weren't for Mo'Nique's fresh, appealing screen presence, Phat Girlz would fall flat.

Eventually, The Unholy reveals itself not to be an entertaining ride to Hell but an earnest sales pitch for the power of Christ. Fair enough. But for Easter 2021, I was hoping for something a little more enjoyably demonic and less been-there-redeemed-that. Let us pray.

The Canyons is actually anything but gratuitously sensational. On the contrary, it’s rather restrained, even conservative affair, far more interested in expositional conversation and a sustained tone of bleached-out melancholy than cranking up the heat.

The corporate-synergy-ness of it all is both deeply distressing and unintentionally fascinating.

Big Fat Liar becomes a progression of increasingly elaborate slapstick stunts, in the brutal, noisy "Home Alone" vein, in which the complexity of the pranks rarely yields a commensurate comic reward.

The characters don't stay still long enough for the audience to worry about them. The high-priced actors (Freeman is especially wasted) are so much flotsam in the big water-tank action scenes.

Simply put, this is a bad, bad film, this summer's answer to last summer's "The League of Extraordinary Gentleman." A dog for the dog days of summer.

McGuigan’s visually vivid Victor Frankenstein races to its lightning-storm finish, running over the solid (if not electrifying) acting of McAvoy and Radcliffe.

A superior entertainment to both "RE 1" and "Alien vs. Predator."

The disappointment here is that an intriguing psychological premise about a personality swap is never used to do anything more than provide the juice for a run-of-the-mill action movie.

The Wicker Man is one of those "what were they thinking?" movies.

If all this sounds familiar, it should. Fathers seldom fare very well in family comedies.

Space Chimps might have been saved, in fact, by using real monkeys in the astronaut roles. Or, better yet, by having a monkey in the director's chair.

Classic style over substance, with some gruesome-looking creatures and settings and non-stop shooting and biting (both the vampires and werewolves get their teeth into it). But, alas, at almost two hours, it is much ado about nothing.

The Art of Getting By is distinguished by a dullness that's almost akin to being in high school again.

The film's police-procedural action is unimaginatively presented, but Oyelowo is compelling.

Unfortunately, Siemaszko's performance is less tour-de-force than schtick-de-sitcom.[9 Oct 1987]

The most important question is one that should be answered before setting foot in the theatre, and it is this: How badly do you want to see Cameron Diaz’s butt? If your answer is so very badly, or even pretty darn bad, then by all means, buy a ticket.

To director Gilles de Maistre’s credit, a story about two astonishingly different animals – who still share a friendship – is rife with footage that puts almost every Dodo video to shame. Yet sadly, nearly all human interactions weigh it down to the point of creating a frustrating, dramatic and heavy-handed film.

Gag is short-lived in predictable plot In this empty confection. Martin Short reprises every character he's ever played, while Danny Glover's detective is straight out of Lethal Weapon. [09 Aug 1991]

Miss Fonda has thought to make a thriller out of that unthrilling process. [12 Dec 1981]

In fashioning a creation myth for Peter Pan, director Joe Wright and writer Jason Fuchs have produced such a thin story that they reduce, rather than amplify, J.M. Barrie’s famous characters.

Parental Guidance is one of those intergenerational embarrassment comedies in the "Meet the Fockers" line, where children can enjoy seeing grown-ups looking ridiculous.

It makes no sense that this fun, feel-good movie about senior citizen cheerleaders should waste so much precious screen time on miserly Keaton hacking up her Metamucil or whatever. If you’re going to make a movie about elderly cheerleaders, bring some brio and physicality to it.

The Secret Of My Success succeeds only on its very limited terms, asking us to forget the flick and remember the star, that cute little package with the endearing Canadian stamp, the flawless comic timing, and the freshest face this side of Care Bear county. Michael J. Fox. So the script is content simply to put your basic romance-comedy through some mighty conventional paces. [04 Apr 1987]

In pairing the two icons, Righteous Kill is definitely an event. What it isn't is much of a movie. Such a waste.

When you pay good money to see an action movie, it's understood that you want it to be action-packed. You do not want it to be action-enhanced or action-flavoured or featuring accents of action.

All of this is interesting, but not all that entertaining.

It’s dreadfully boring to anyone over the age of 4, but at least it isn’t trying to sell kids anything. I guess that’s a plus.

Never before have such acting heavyweights been so misused on screen.

In today's cultural climate, any remake of Conan the Barbarian can only be considered (a) redundant or (b) a cruel case of rubbing salt in our cinematic wounds. Either way, it ain't a pretty sight – in fact, it's downright barbaric.

Crazy as this might sound, it turns out that self-indulgent ramblings designed to put your children to sleep are pretty much the opposite of art.

Like its characters, That Awkward Moment has commitment issues: It lacks the courage of its bad taste.

Sadly, Bacon is only intermittently convincing as a man hell-bent on revenge or a father tortured by what he has unleashed on his family.

A film that should be shamelessly soaked in passion and thrusting erotic delirium is instead posed and prettified, to the point where “camp” comes to mean more than the place where lumberjacks work – it’s also the movie’s defining vibe.

Alig's superficiality seems to have been his only talent. His banality is a problem that the film can't overcome.

Runner Runner is a bad run of cliché clichés.

The overall mood of Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man may be one of good-natured idiocy, but it's hard to fault a movie for being stupid when stupidity is its one and only raison d'etre. [23 Aug 1991]

Inventive and vibrant action sequences boasting exceptional 3-D effects and inspired voice casting (including Jackie Chan as a warrior mouse and Peter Stormare as a deranged exterminator) help to elevate this to something better than vaporous.

The script (by Robert Reneau) is snappier than the movie deserves, and supplies a dose of wise-guy humor to director Craig R. Baxley's idiot version of James Bond Gets Down in Motown. [15 Feb 1988]

It works best when it doesn't take itself seriously, and some of the ways in which ESP is faked are briefly engaging, like short con games or magic tricks revealed. But, finally, the film doesn't offer the sense of release, or of surprise, that it seems to take for granted.

Sparks fly and so do private helicopters, but will true love prevail? Are you paying attention?

Isn't so much a movie as a 90-minute Trivial Pursuit contest to name bit players from TV's distant past.

Sorta-kinda based on the true story of astronaut Lisa Nowak, Noah Hawley’s directorial debut may have started out as a feminist-forward film decrying the fact that women have to work five times as hard to succeed in the workplace, but it ends up being a movie whose message boils down to, “Ladies be crazy.”

It's a dumb-ass comedy done strictly for a seriously large paycheque.

There are a couple of minutes of unscheduled surgery to put this in the sadistic fantasy genre of "Saw" and "Hostel," but mostly the movie plays out like a cheap survivalist copy of the television series "Lost."

If you have kids who are easily frightened, bring them to Alpha and Omega, a 3-D movie with training wheels. Kids may not like it, but they'll never fall off the ride.

You know a movie has taken a very strange turn when you find yourself eagerly awaiting the next appearance by Donny Osmond.

Without a thin tether to credibility, this fussy, morbid fantasy simply slides off into the void.

Well acted and crisply directed, this latest version can at least make a claim to competence.

Notable for its enthusiastic abandonment of any semblance of narrative coherence.

Over all, the movie is just funny enough to make you wish it were much better than it is.

Say this for I Am Number Four: It's blessedly free of any original sins. Instead, they're all copied. Here a little "Superman," there a bit of "Spider-Man," now it's "Twilight" with aliens, then it's a spaghetti western with trucks – this thing borrows more heavily than an investment bank in an unregulated market.

What Happens in Vegas should damn well have stayed in Vegas.

The story, of course, is a line on which to pin the comic set-pieces, and that's where Pink Panther 2 comes up lustreless. Zwart has no discernible sense of comic rhythm, beyond managing to punctuate scenes with a wall crashing in.

An incoherent mess of a movie with a neat boat chase near the end. [21 Sept 1993]

The sisterhood is already grumbling about a movie that suggests women will happily choose a mate over friendship, but actually it's the stereotypes of good behaviour rather than bad that bring this rom com crashing down.

The Invisible isn't the formulaic horror film that the studio is selling it as but surely it wasn't supposed to be an accidental comedy either.

Rambo's return is thick with usual thrills. [26 May 1988, p.C1]

There is little here for parents, and not much for the kids. [17 Feb 1997, p.C3]

You leave Stolen Summer with the feeling that you have watched acrobats stumble on a tightrope with no net below. Not a great show, but at least nobody got badly hurt.

After all the cyberspace chat is over, after all the cyberpunk sets are unveiled, what we are left with is a tired theme afforded a banal treatment. [26 May 1995]

License to Drive, directed by Greg Beeman and written by Montreal's Neil Tolkin, is not only stupid, a virtual requirement of summer teen exploitation movies, it's also nasty: it's been designed to turn its swooning target audience into a pajama party of neurotics. [08 July 1988]

There is no narrative tension in the film, however, just a variety of grisly crucifixions. And the morality tales are blood-stained window dressing.

Pitched Squarely to the teeny set, Can't Buy Me Love tacks a grade-school moral onto a high-school tale: be yourself, kiddies; don't follow the trendy crowd; popularity ain't what it's cracked up to be. Of course, it says all this while trying desperately to be the most popular flick since box met office. [14 Aug 1987]

Label this one a howler, and add a postscipt to the sequel: shoo Fly II, go forth and don't multiply. [11 Feb 1989]

Suggestive of "X-Men," "The Matrix" and the television show "Heroes," Push is one of those time-mangling thrillers that manages to seem both complicated and superficial.

The film has its moments and some things to say about honesty and selflessness, but the plot is manipulated and the ending is not an ending. Truth be known.

Slowly, but not always confidently, Dowse and Mack begin to upend obligations of the structure, play fast and loose with the limits of good taste and wind up with, while far from a comedic masterpiece, an enjoyably reckless piece of vulgar entertainment.

The original Oh, God was a one-note joke that the irresistible George Burns managed to turn into an engaging film. However, even Burns' charm is insufficient to sustain that note through the inevitable sequel. [07 Oct 1980]

Unlike the smarter "Maleficent," a revisionist Sleeping Beauty created by the same producers, what The Huntsman series lacks is any intriguing psychology.

Everyone in the movie, of course, is anxious to see these comeback seniors beat each other up, except, perhaps, the viewing audience.

Unfortunately, both Bridges and Anderson are only intermittently in the movie. And when they're not around, How to Lose Friends loses its satirical edge, becoming an alarmingly safe, almost corny romantic comedy.

While computer games can boast an abundance of nifty graphics and odious villains and plucky protagonists on long journeys, they're invariably a tad wanting in the cinematic essentials -- you know, stuff like plot and characterization and theme.

So for those asking the obvious: Yes, Awake should put you to sleep rather quickly.

What My Blue Heaven has going for it: one funny premise and two earthly delights, in the comic persons of Steve Martin and Rick Moranis. What My Blue Heaven does not have going for it: anything remotely resembling a cohesive script. [22 Aug 1990, p.C4]

Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, xXx) is no stranger to cornball excess but Stealth is his chef-d'oeuvre, a movie so audaciously preposterous and jingoistic it plays like a parody of the genre.

While the movie and the accompanying series are being pitched to a younger audience than most new Star Wars ventures, parents may be perturbed by the film's relentless violence.

Where to even begin with Venom, a film that had me laughing at it so hard I started crying. A horribly scripted film so bad as to be enjoyable, but not bad enough to be good.

Woefully short on script, the picture ends up disappearing down the wormhole of its own premise.

Xia's humble sifu lends more gravitas than this dreck deserves, and a rousing, improbable finale in which Lee and Man take on the mob together offers some great fight choreography, but it's all too little, too late.

The real weak point is Reiner's listless direction, with too few scenes that almost gel and too many that fall flat.

One of the most chaotically stupid action movies to torture audiences in ages.

The Hustle should’ve been a comedy that served equal parts wit and social commentary – otherwise, why gender-swap? It should’ve given Wilson and Hathaway a means through which to shine. These are talented, seasoned, capable women. And for their experience to be wasted in a production that is below them, below their director’s filmography and below the original material is tragic.

Taken on its own, this is a masterful little slice of computer-generated animation, but it gets lost here in the visual racket.

Fabulous idea/faulty execution is the review.

Mostly, the plot is busy and incomprehensible and the action sequences directed with all the art of a detonation.

From the base-model script to the assembly-line thrills, everything about Hide and Seek is generic except its star.

Narratively, the film strikes all the sentimental chords that audiences typically find so reassuring, but the music grates here, sounding mechanical and flat, lacking the single ingredient indispensable to any uplifting fable - a charming belief in its own sweet nature. [19 Apr 1996, p. C1]