It’s the direction, not the script, that really kills the picture, as Mazer limps along from the chugging contest to the half-naked conga line to the car chase without ever raising the laughs he needs from the comic set pieces or the tension he needs from the dramatic developments.

So here’s an idea: Maybe filmmakers should shoot what Ashton’s up to off-camera, because not many laughs are making it to the screen.

Because it’s emotionally manipulative, unashamedly contrived and outrageously sentimental. Lead actor Oscar Isaac doesn’t care a damn about that, mind you, giving a memorably heart-wrenching performance anyway.

Dopey.

It's outstandingly obnoxious.

Never one to shrink from the challenge of parodying the already parodic, along comes Marlon Wayans to do in A Haunted House what he once did in "Scary Movie." And do it much, much worse.

While not as edgy or funny as "The Mask," the popular 1994 "original" starring Jim Carrey, the movie offers eye-popping animation high-jinks and a warm-and-fuzzy story that reinforces what some would call family values.

The story is a much more serious problem, a run-on, overstuffed narrative that feels like a very long prologue for a climax that never comes.

Why are movies about sophisticated technology and hidden persuaders and subliminal seduction - Agency is the other example that springs immediately to mind - so technically sloppy, so incapable of persuading even the smallest child of their plausibility and so utterly unable to seduce someone dying to be ravished by a well-made thriller? [2 Nov 1981]

A semi-intriguing abomination, the movie The Cat in the Hat takes a piece of classic childhood Americana and turns it into something garish, dumb, ugly and senseless.

Frankly, about 20 minutes into this dud, I was rooting for the alien beasties -- their diagnosis seemed dead-on.

Grade Underclassman an "Unacceptable effort," and "D" for derivative.

Old Dogs is offensive mostly because it wastes time.

One Star (and only for quoting Knee-Chee).

A mundane sitcom with feature pretensions, the kind where the comic "situation" is simply a coat-rack for hanging a rag-tag assortment of inflated sight gags and telegraphed punch lines.

Like its predecessor, Grown Ups 2 is proudly retrograde, both in its relentless deluge of toilet humour and the way it bear-hugs some good old-fashioned conservative values.

Like Jerry Springer, it's loaded with class bias, offering a condescending fantasy that sees the poor as exotically grotesque, promiscuous, violent, and spiritually doomed. [17 Oct. 1997, p.D9]

Mind-numbing, soul-testing, character-defiling experience that offers not one nanosecond of comic relief.

When animal passion turns into animal stupidity. [1 May 1990]

There must be a musical somewhere in the musty vaults of movie history as bad as The Pirate Movie, but I'm at a loss to recall it - speaking comparatively, this unclean thing imparts to Can't Stop the Music and Xanadu the delicacy and charm of a moment with Fred Astaire. It makes you long for The Blue Lagoon. It encourages you to baste yourself in that masterpiece of oily ennui, Summer Lovers. It makes an evening with Kate Smith look good; hell, it makes an evening with Margaret Trudeau look good. [9 Aug 1982]

About the only fun to be had in the movie is screenwriter Alan McElroy's cartoon spook-speak.

It's all very pat and, ultimately, annoying.

Brain-melting, head-spinning rank toxicity that shows no evidence of intelligence as we know it.

Remember that the director, the renowned Mike Mitchell, is the genius who helmed "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo," and be sufficiently generous to accept that such a high level of excellence is hard to sustain.

You will die at the hands of Zed's unborn son. Shucks, those wicked witches sure had a way of taking the fun out of life. Luckily for scheming kings, sadly for blameless movie-goers, such party-pooping prophecies are now mainly confined to formulaic flicks like The Beastmaster. [23 Aug 1982]

This is Canadian cinema as defiantly ugly and mean as anything churned out from the bowels of callous ol’ Hollywood.

A hypnotic, black hole of a movie that sucks reputations, careers and goodwill down its vortex. Rarely has a movie that doesn't star Madonna achieved such a skin-crawling mixture of deluded preening and bungled humour.

No less laughable is the ending, where Ritchie neatly reflects today's prevailing attitude -- that audiences can't be trusted to handle a hint of ambiguity, but can live happily with flat-out stupidity.