What's up with director John McTiernan? The man has got to get a career of his own -- sponging off the pale leavings of Norman Jewison just won't do.

Forgettable.

The resolution of that conflict is dishonestly implausible, thus ruining a perfectly mediocre movie. The worst of it is that Fred the one-eyed cat was probably winking at us the whole time.

Despite some clever, winking nods to the original, including appearances by Cook herself and Matthew Lillard, He’s All That fails to deliver on what She’s All That did so well: a sweet, lighthearted romance that hinges on the chemistry between its two leads.

Instead, you get a nominal character study that boasts a single mighty performance and one nifty scene; alas, both performance and scene exist in a narrative vacuum - the plot is non-existent and the pace makes the ice age seem hasty.

Ver Linden has the potential to twist and upend expectations – to play with genre and character in a way that reworks and remixes both film history and storytelling. Instead, she spends the majority of her film’s runtime vaguely approaching those intentions rather than actually materializing them. It is a tiring series of runarounds that viewers will lose patience for.

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

The dramatic justification for all this careless maligning of gypsies and lawyers remains as enigmatic as the film's title. The only sure thing about Stephen King's Thinner,in the end, is that Stephen King's bank account is fatter.

Erased, I predict, is a word that will be used to describe what happens to your memory of this cloned facsimile of a movie immediately after watching it.

Whoopi (a beleaguered figure these days) single-handedly cranks up the volume now and again, earning a chuckle or two, but then settles lazily back, apparently content to bank on the formula and imagine the box- office. [10 Dec 1993]

Before I Fall takes the premise of Harold Ramis’s rom-com and drains it of soul, soft touches and humorous pathos, plodding through its message of being a better person with all the sprightly grace of a sedated subterranean rodent being dragged out of a pretend hibernation den.

As it giggles away at its campy self, at least you can groan along with it.

This story, like many of Towne's own, does not come with a happy ending. Or beginning, for that matter, because it's almost immediately clear that Ask the Dust bites the dust -- his dream movie is stillborn.

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

Filled with visual potential, yet Levinson can't tap it. He's just a whole lot more comfortable trying to tame the human software than the technical hardware.

For faithful and faithless alike, The Shack may seem stupid, laughable, blasphemous, poorly acted and totally banal. And yet there are probably worse things then being told it’s righteous to forgive and that love is good.

A plot so thin you could filter coffee through it.

It's a jumbled mess, to put it mildly.

If that wasn’t enough, there is something even more dispiriting about Doctor Strange beyond its halfhearted visual and narrative ambitions – an issue that made a brief blip on the cultural radar when the film was first announced but has distressingly gone unheard of since: This is a movie that revels in whitewashing.

It’s hard to argue with the title here – Safe Haven, indeed. This is all about safety in the Hollywood workplace. Why make a movie when making a Hallmark-card-with-dialogue is so much less risky?

Baby Boom has the fluffy amiability of an innocuous sitcom. In their rightful place on the shrunken sets of the small screen, its teeny characters would seem comfortably at home. But blown up to feature dimensions, they betray their flimsy origins, looking thin and transparent, just a bunch of under-considered ideas decked out in over-sized finery. [10 Oct 1987]

I confess to a deep uncertainty about whether this can be rightly called a movie. A bunch of scenes, maybe... I confess to a cynical belief that Lola isn't actually a role but just a succession of costume changes.

Had the film version of Pet Sematary, adapted straightforwardly by King himself from the novel, and directed with horrifying ineptitude by Mary Lambert (Siesta), been any good, it would have been a sizzling shockeroonie, in that it deals, to borrow King's italicized style, with things best left undealt with, notably resurrected murderous children and the terrors instilled by terminal illness. [24 Apr 1989]

A lazy Melissa McCarthy vehicle that relies on relentless potty-mouth moments.

Just because Body could be made doesn’t mean it needed to be.

Vacation Friends could’ve been the fun, lackadaisical resort comedy it wants to be. Our ensemble has considerable chemistry and are all charismatic performers in their own right. It’s fun to watch Cena in goading jock mode, until Howery jumps off a cliff with his glasses still on. Unfortunately, Tarver’s film soon veers hard on its cinematic jet skis, and falls flat on its face.

All would be forgiven if Peter were worth believing in. Instead, the boy who wouldn't grow up comes off like a shrill, obnoxious little drip. Shrek should give him a right pounding.

I also appreciated the film’s quick glimpse of Hell itself, which Lucia is plunged into as a warning to whose who won’t accept salvation. With its cheap CGI demons and soundtrack of wailing souls, it was unintentional comedy of the highest order. If you need me, I’ll be laughing all the way to Hades.