A family-friendly adventure.

As entertainment, the film is pedantic and over-dramatic, with the string section working overtime on the soundtrack.

Shamelessly cross-promotional "extreme" sports flick.

Just when you thought this movie had run out of bad ideas, this last-minute outpouring of sanctimony feels like a whole new way of being slimed. Some movies come with parental warnings; this one feels as though it should come with a mandatory biohazard suit.

For about 20 minutes, Phantoms, based on Dean Koontz's bestseller, keeps you guessing. After that, it barely keeps you awake.

Too tame in its violence to be thrilling, too flat in its gags to be funny, and too PG-minded to be genuinely sexy, Morel’s film arrives and exits like a mild breeze – totally and utterly forgettable. John Cena deserves better. And so do we.

If the external threat in the plot were a little more credible, this would be an annoying distraction. But in the context of the rest of Gloria, it's a safe strategy: When not watching Sharon Stone act, audiences can fall back on just watching Sharon Stone.

Reportedly, the movie began life as a short film, and if it actually ran for 22 minutes with a few commercial breaks, like a good sitcom should, Filth and Wisdom could be bearable. At 84 minutes, the movie feels both overpadded and underdeveloped.

Perhaps the major disappointment of Silver Bullet is that it never gets as bad as the beginning promises. From playing on the precipice of so-bad- it's-good, Silver Bullet bobs up to the level of conventionally mediocre- bad, and remains there until the closing credits. [12 Oct 1985]

So intent are the Strausses on showing off their visual chops, they leave the film's story, dialogue and acting in shambles.

An underdog's breakfast of a movie, with some quite funny characters and set pieces mixed with some excruciating "moral lessons," but at least it moves along at a brisk pace.

Director Marshall ( Pretty Woman) has created a comic drama so confused in tone, the actors often seem to be acting in different movies.

Forget about "Saw," "Hostel" and all the other films in the new, notorious torture-porn genre. If you're looking for a really sick movie, check out License to Wed.

At the end of The Comebacks, Coach is offered job with a college basketball team called The Sequels - a joke perhaps, but all too horrifying a prospect after watching this dull fumble.

The film's putrid sexism is subverted in a series of sharp and funny scenes that at least raise Sorority Boys to the level of "American Pie."

Lutz and fellow operative Carano are as warm and responsive as Ping-Pong paddles, batting lines back and forth lifelessly.

Would-be horror film has little upstairs. Warped and wilted in the attic. [25 Nov 1987]

Mainly, you have to wonder why Allyson doesn’t just hire a nanny, find a job and get out of the house. Ah, but this is a Christian movie, and once it stops pelting an audience with comic incident, it begins preaching.

A Cinderella Story has little of the smarts that distinguished this spring's big teen hit, "Mean Girls", which starred Duff's arch-rival, Lindsay Lohan. Whereas that film presented a genuinely complex and enjoyably snarky portrait of modern teen life, this effort is content to be another candy-coloured fantasy.

In the case of When in Rome, oh to do what the Romans used to do: Toss the bloody thing to the lions.

A few early laughs scattered around a plot as thin as it is repetitious. There's talent in this picture, both before and behind the camera, but virtually none of it gets on the screen.

The whole mess turns nuttier by the second. A black comedy, you ask? I wish. There are plenty of laughs here, but nary a one is intentional.

This time the action takes us out of the usual campgrounds and girls in underwear into the realm of outer space, where no one can hear you screaming "Enough already."

Dragonfly has more plot than a figure-skating competition, and just about as much credibility.

Wilder's created world is alive with his erudition, his sympathy for his characters in their loneliness and flawed goodness. This film doesn't do him justice but it's a gesture in the right direction.

Pretty much everything about Rings is incoherent. And the most incoherent thing of all is the film’s arrival a decade and a half after Verbinski’s original remake (if such a term even makes sense).

Yes, it's all quite mad, Max, with a shaggy-dog ending to boot. But this giddiness, its go-for-broke/what-the-hellness, also is the film's strength.

The bottom line for this genre is that the guys are goofy and likable, the pacing is quick and there are a lot of laughs. In a dumb-California-kids movie, that's all you really need. [25 May 1992]

There's nothing even mildly intriguing, or remotely galvanizing, about Showgirls.

An awkward, painful mash-up of horror and comedy that induces all the wrong kind of squirms.

Taylor Lautner puts the abs in Abduction, but not much else.

When a movie ostensibly on a serious subject is so God-awful silly, is it impossible to be offended, or impossible not to be?

The Family is running from The Hun (Malcolm McDowell). The Family is not running as fast as I would like to have run from The Passage. [29 Mar 1979]

It’s all quest, flash and high action.

TARZAN The Ape Man, in which Bo Derek (the 10 of 10) is Jane to newcomer Miles O'Keeffe's mute Tarzan (his chests are bigger than hers), takes 45 minutes to get to the reasons the film may have attracted an audience. As nearly as I can figure, based on the soft-core porn of the advertisements, the reasons are three: two belong to Miss Derek, one to O'Keeffe. But although Miss Derek's reasons do receive screen time (O'Keeffe's reason remains unviewed, to the vocal scorn of women in the audience), this topless Tarzan is not soft-core porn, which might justify, on a utilitarian basis, its existence. It's not that good. [25 July 1981]

If physical appearance creates its own class system (in high school and beyond), then Qualls is perfect for this proselytizing role. He has that rarest of movie-star faces -- one that over comes the tyranny of beauty.

As Playing With Fire progressed, it became increasingly clear that the target audience was not respected. This was made by people who seem to think kids are stupid.

This one is a big, big disappointment. [27 July 1987]

The tedious, tortuous storyline and lifeless cast are two larger problems.

Doesn't work because it isn't much of a ride. The action scenes are strictly by rote. The incidental characters are all incidental.

The obvious problem with The Whole Ten Yards is that it begins with the wrong kidnapping. Instead of taking Oz's wife, the criminals should have grabbed the authors of the original movie.

As cinematic flops go, nothing falls quite as hard as a failed black comedy.

Piranha 3DD is overcrowded and pointlessly mean. The stunt casting of David Hasselhoff playing himself, riffing off his infamous 2007 drunken home video, gets in the way of the storyline.

Moving Violations is mentally inert, another sawdust-filled sausage for the adolescent market.

Rad has the best opening credits sequence since the last James Bond picture, but it has nowhere to go from there. It doesn't even try. [3 Apr 1986, p.D6]

Without Spielberg's technical pizazz, and with a gummy mixture of homage and spoof, Congo chokes on its own tongue in cheek.

Consequently, as star vehicles go, Ford Fairlane runs straight over the very guy it's meant to transport. Some will see that as the movie's greatest fault, others as its only virtue. Take your pick, and come out swinging. [13 Jul 1990, p.C1]

The movie pretty much blows.

Jawbreaker breaks ground in one way. The movie is notably unpleasant, not just because it's morally offensive, but because it strives for this arch, artificial John Waters tone without any accompanying pay-off in wit.

There's an audience for this sort of rude and rough comedy, though it might consist mostly of guys who wear raincoats a lot and prefer their women on glossy paper with staples. [13 Jun 1998, p.C3]

Give this call a miss.

A lurid thriller that marks a new career low for both director Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields, The Mission) and co-screenwriter Larry Cohen (Phone Booth, It's Alive).

Here's a truly novel sports film: It actually has a script, decent acting, sympathetic characters. And it's fun.

Is Kazaam racist? In effect, yes. But it'sracism linked to bad marketing: You can't really mix a black-pride rap film with a revamped version of "Free Willie" and expect them to magically jibe.

What can you say about a film the comic high point of which is Dan Aykroyd standing half-naked in a bathroom while extracting hairs from his nostrils with manicure scissors? For starters you can say it's bad, as bad as a film can be that looks to National Lampoon's Vacation for creative inspiration. [17 June 1988]

There are moments, however fleeting, that suggest there’s a decent Mel Brooks-ian farce hiding amidst the wreckage. Deeply, profoundly hidden moments, but peeking through every now and then, an annoyingly sporadic Christmas miracle.

And De Bont's effects are wildly over the top, devoid of the stylish cuts and intriguing angles that enriched the original. In fact, there's so little panache in his destructive action that it begins to seem like a weird act of self-destruction.

Highlander's flashy style is the cinematic equivalent of a Las Vegas chorus line: always kicking. Without Lambert, who displays an unexpected comic talent along with intensely photogenic passive-aggressive eyes, and Roxanne Hart, whose knowledgeable portrayal of a New York detective is undercut by the symphony of screams extracted from her toward the end, and Connery, who wears a pearl-drop earring and is supposed to be Spanish but still has the burr and brio of James Bond, Highlander would be little more than an everlasting video; it's not much more than that, as it is. [10 Mar 1986, p.C9]

Stallone's sequel has almost nothing to do with the original film except that it's about dancing; otherwise, it's Rocky IV with legwarmers. [16 Jul 1983]

Here's a movie that tries to be a video game but is less entertaining than a vending machine.

THERE'S NO excuse for Her Alibi. A hyphenated hybrid like this - romance- comedy-thriller - demands a lot of stirring; if nothing else (and there rarely is much else), it must at least be smooth, colorful and easy on the palate. Instead, the stuff here goes down like lumpy porridge on a grey morning.[3 Feb 1989]

The Love Guru is a comedy like the Leafs are a hockey team.

The Boondock Saints II does, from time to time, display a vulgar charm. Or maybe it just wears you out.

Like the recent Adam Sandler dud "Jack and Jill," a sizable chunk of Chip-Wrecked was shot on the newest ship in the fleet of a major cruise company – the ultimate in movie product placement!

The slapdash dialogue and smug vocal talent -- even the presence of the much-loved host of "The Daily Show" is wearying -- detract from the visual appeal of the most energetic sequences (like a raucous train chase) and what's left of Danot's designs.

The first 48 HRS. was similiarly nasty and violent, and it too was emptier than the inside of an efficient bell jar, but it was funny. Eight years later, director Walter Hill can find nothing to laugh about - the violence in this appalling picture is played out in a mirthlessly misanthropic vacuum. [8 Jun 1990, p.C1]

The paradox here is that the message of respect for animal life is outweighed by the lack of respect for human beings.

In the worst scenes in Deuce Bigalow: European Bigalow, it's as if Schneider and Co. are straining to invent new taboos just so they can break them, a strategy that provokes more confused silence than laughter.

Scriptwriter Allan Loeb, the man behind more than one Kevin James vehicle, attempts Christmastime magic à la "Miracle on 34th Street," but ends up conjuring Maudlin on Madison Avenue instead.

An awkward, needlessly dark, atrocious mess whose visual tics courtesy of director Tomas Alfredson amount to, basically, snow. So. Much. Snow. Shockingly, a fetish for the white stuff in no way overcomes any clunky narrative obstacles here – and they are legion.

A noxious PG comedy starring Adam Sandler as a pair of middle-aged male-female twins that should have been separated at birth to spare us from this movie.

Here's the title: Couples Retreat. And here's the review: Couples, Retreat. Yep, just find the verb, treat it as a command, and vamoose, unless you harbour an abiding curiosity about how eternally long 100 minutes can feel.

The movie is sentimental and reliant on bodily-function humour, but it also has a generous spirit, a multicultural rainbow of characters, and a social message about approaching fatherhood responsibly.

The film's up-yours attitude toward authority is cheering, but as personified by Robert Culp (he's the mayor of New York), authority is so comic-strip in its hideousness that fighting it is beside the point. If the audience can't believe in the reality of the opponent, it can't believe in the reality of the fight. [15 Feb 1985]

A formula flick. And the formula is not 51 times more entertaining than usual. Maybe 1.5, at best.

It is hard to say what is more despicable about The Condemned: the overtly racist portrayal of Brekel-Goldman as Jewish-media bloodsuckers, or the film's sleazeball attempt to pass off lovingly attentive sequences of ritual torture - often scenes of incredible hulks bashing cowering women - as a critique of media violence.

God forgive me, but I worship the Bad Dialogue Fairy -- he gets me through these endless nights.

Both syrupy and scatological, this is a typical family-dividing Sandler comedy: Parents will hate it but the kids will delight in its rudeness.

A shoot-'em-up for cynical times. Its only asset is Seagal himself, and frankly, he's is getting a bit past it.

The film can't be accused of taking itself seriously. Shot in 3-D, with lots of choppy action, a rudimentary plot, and plenty of CGI-shape-shifting, it comes in at a brisk, disposable 88 minutes.

American Heist, I want my 94 minutes back.

Naturally, Brooklyn is the setting for the type of old-fashioned brand of fairy-tale film this stinker aspires to be, but each time the inspirational Brooklyn Bridge is shown the desire to jump off it is doubled.

A painfully contrived romantic comedy/thriller that may (or may not) have brought Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston together as a real-life couple.

The film’s sense of history is hasty, its characterizations crude. And by combining a twinkly-eyed tone with some of the goofiest performances in recent memory, the whole thing constantly threatens to reveal itself as a stealth parody flick.

The comedy is limp; a sentimental, existential ending is cut-rate and unearned.

The plot, for instance, doesn’t make all that much sense, what with its heroic space chimps and evil space apes and sly space foxes, all of whom don’t seem to realize what a half-baked narrative they’re operating in.

Good Landis work looks like a comically heightened reality, and it scores with sharp moments in which the world is ridiculous and being American is possibly just as ridiculous. Spies Like Us, his latest, ranks with his poorest efforts, in which strange people start out in extraordinary situations and the lead characters have a pig-out; pushing for wildness, Landis gets mired in crudity (as in Animal House). [09 Dec 1985]

Judging by Friday the 13th, Sean S. Cunningham is not a great, not a good, not even a barely competent director. He has said that "a filmmaker must be part magician, part gypsy and part huckster." On the basis of this effort, Cunningham has conveniently overlooked the first two components and settled for a complete mastery of the third. [14 May 1980]

Lazy, perfunctory and free of tension, the new version will satisfy neither the admirers of the original nor anyone looking for a gory respite from seasonal good cheer.

New Year's Eve. It's big and shiny and crowded and no matter how much you might look forward to it, it never lives up to the hype. The movie is even worse.

The Villain is itself an extended cartoon, a cartoon with live actors as its director Hal Needham redundantly describes it. The result: while we still guffaw once or twice, our suffering increases proportionately as we are made to sit through a full 80 minutes of numbing mindlessness. [25 July 1979]

What Boll gives us is a boring beating over the head.

By the time the movie actually arrives at its finest moment – a nearly two-minute single shot from the Mustang’s hood as it chases the villain’s van through dense traffic – you’ve become so numb to speed and sensation that you may barely notice.

In this new era of McG movies, you can simply turn his film off, walk a few steps to your bedroom and go to sleep.

Blame It On Rio is still a lot of fun. The colorful locations help out when the situations in them begin to pall. [17 Feb 1984]

Ho, ho, horrible.

Listlessly directed by Julie Anne Robinson (Miley Cyrus's The Last Song) from a script written by a trio of writers (Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray and Liz Brixius), One for the Money is tepidly glib throughout.

If anything, this film is a cautionary tale for those who clamour for the driverless car.