D-grade "Running Man" ripoff.

The action is nearly relentless, only occasionally interrupted by humorless, tedious exposition, but despite the freneticism it’s almost all completely boring.

Managing nary a single original idea throughout its 93-minute running time, the film does benefit from a cast of sexy young TV stars who should attract the desired female teen demographic.

The sometimes forced if well-intentioned social proselytizing is alleviated by the well-drawn relationships among the central characters.

Writer-director J.C. Khoury’s second feature is a romantic dramedy featuring a conventionally appealing cast that’s squandered on a dissatisfingly derivative premise.

Glossier and more lavishly produced than most faith-based films, the film directed by Steve Race is ultimately undone by a relentless preachiness that gives it the feel of a two-hour sermon.

Despite a talented cast lead by Halle Berry, director John Stockwell fails to take more than a bite out of this lackluster shark thriller.

Whatever you have to pay, it's too much.

In a movie built on the idea of walking in someone else's shoes, shouldn't learning to see others as more than stereotypes be fairly central to the plot's development?

Even fans who've stuck with Smith for two decades may draw the line at this outing, which offers ingredients just as inexplicable as those in Tusk (it's a sort of spinoff of that film) without the captivating weirdness that sometimes brought that midnighter to life.

The film is smart enough not to wear out its welcome. But that's the only sign of true intelligence in this juvenile caper.

A run-of-the-mill crime drama that toes the risibility line on several occasions, even if it’s better made than your typical straight-to-video movie.

A teens-in-trouble thriller with barely enough momentum to make it to the end credits. Performances and script are made-for-cable grade.

The mishmash ends up as a thoroughly unfunny adult cartoon.

By now, it's clear that every Adam Sandler movie is dada of the high-concept, low-hanging-fruit variety, in which the Happy Madison stock company uses filmmaking (loosely termed) as an excuse to take an extended tropical vacation.

Most of the major events in Reagan’s life are covered, but few of them are recounted in an incisive fashion.

As the narrative limps along from one encounter to the next, a suspicion grows: Father Figures doesn't need to exist; but if it's going to exist, perhaps some sharper comedic talents could have developed it as a limited-run Netflix show, with each encounter developed as a half-hour episode.

The overstuffed film is definitely less than the sum of its admittedly occasionally scary parts.

Won't likely disappoint fans of men-in-drag comedy but doesn't offer much that's original or funny.

Gallo displays none of the screenwriting elan he's exhibited in such previous efforts as Midnight Run and the Bad Boys films, although here it's hard to separate the ponderous dialogue from the way it's delivered.

There’s scant evidence of any creative spark in Spark: A Space Tail, a thoroughly generic, unremittingly charmless computer-animated adventure.

The comedy here feels secondhand and becomes grating when no cliche is left unused, whether about nationality, race, gays or the female gender.

Gruesome violence, in which throats are slashed and heads are split open in realistic detail, is the sum content of Friday the 13th, a sick and sickening low budget feature that is being released by Paramount. It’s blatant exploitation of the lowest order.

As the stuntmen duke it out and we see close-ups of the two actors making silly faces, it's hard not imagine a Mystery Science Theater 3000 feature in the making.

Irving and screenwriter Peter Warren find it surprisingly hard to milk the charms of performers like Amy Sedaris and Justin Long for laughs.

Hicham Hajji's debut — while featuring an impressive supporting cast and admirably attempting to inject political commentary into its mix — proves such a wan, ineffective vehicle that it leaves its star all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Starts out as a potentially interesting psychological thriller before devolving into familiar horror movie tropes.

There are a couple clever touches here and there, including one sequence in which the end of a candy cane has been carefully licked into a highly lethal weapon, but for the most part the accompanying histrionics feel more regressive than retro.

Joel Schumacher's Twelve, the latest expose of self-indulgence among privileged teens, is sleek, giddy fun.

The result proves to be as appealing and effervescent as a flute of flat champagne.

The kind of blithely confident, creatively impoverished dud that leaves you slightly stunned someone greenlit it, the movie has the distinction of feeling like a bad idea from its very first frames.

A turgid mess of a film that has a lot of ideas on its mind, none of which prove very interesting or in fact coherent.

Litvack is lazy with his jokes, characterizations, motives, and plotting.

Deviating from the original in some key respects, this version of Martyrs doesn't make much of a case for its inspiration, but it may attract those hardcore horror fans averse to reading subtitles.

If the degree of laughter at the wrong moments and the number of walkouts at the Toronto International Film Festival are any indication, the film will appeal only to the most fondly indulgent.

If The Legend of Hercules were just a little more inept or over-the-top, it might have been ridiculous fun. As it is, unfortunately, Harlin embraces the mediocrity of the screenplay with a dour straight face, draining it of any enjoyably camp possibilities.

Getaway seems built for non-English speaking territories in which dialogue is as disposable as Bulgarian police cars. If only those audiences were as dumb as the action itself.

Director Jonathan M. Gunn and screenwriters Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon are hard-pressed to provide the superfluous characters and situations sufficient depth, with the proceedings featuring enough melodramatic plot developments and homilies to fuel a religious soap opera.

The PG-13 film is heavy on scenes of cloudy blood in the water but almost entirely lacking shock shots of flesh torn asunder. (And while marketing relies heavily on bikinis, the movie's light on that kind of flesh as well.)

Despite a lot of admirable aims, such as creating layered roles for the Latino acting community and spending production dollars in areas that could benefit from the economic boost, this grim bloodbath feels too routine to be of much interest.

Perhaps a greater passage of time was needed to provide a more effective historical perspective, but "Tiger" has a bigger problem with a dramatic structure that sags conspicuously in the middle, never to completely correct itself.

The result is yet another paean to arrested male adolescence that should be mandatory viewing in convents to prevent nuns from thinking of renouncing their vows of celibacy.

A Christmas comedy where laughs and even Christmas joy are in short supply.

Over the decades, there’s been no shortage of boneheaded premises for romantic comedies, but the painfully ill-conceived Barefoot takes boneheadedness to regrettable places.

This faith-based drama "inspired by true events" (a phrase that hereafter has lost all its meaning) manages to be dumb on so many levels that, well, it simply has to be taken on faith.

Pegging most of its hopes on two actors who hardly maintain the taut chemistry its long two-hander section requires, the pic plays like the feature debut it is, an uncertain drama full of attitude it can't back up with action.

"Just to document yourself being bored is very boring," Enci says at one point. It's one moment of fiction here that rings all too true.

If this were the feature-length pilot episode for some cheap reboot on a streaming service — which is what it feels like — a generous viewer might half-heartedly agree to tune in next week and see if things get more interesting. But on the big screen? A sequel would be less welcome than a new episode of, say, Charlie's Angels. Or Starsky & Hutch.

Bereft of interesting characters, clever dialogue and any semblance of humor or visual coherence, Exists offers nothing to justify its cinematic existence.

Starring a painfully awkward Katherine Heigl, One for the Money mostly resembles a failed television pilot.

Suffering from tonal inconsistency and all-too-familiar thematic elements, as well as an absurd framing device whose logic is not even consistently maintained, Locker 13 hardly deserves being opened.

While the filmmaking is crudely effective at best, it successfully showcases the physical, if not the acting talents, of its largely female cast.

Not bad enough to be a guilty pleasure, but plenty bad nonetheless.

There's insufficient suspense in the life-or-death stakes, sketchy plot detail in the gang clash that triggers the action and too little ambiguity in the intercharacter dynamics.

A curiosity telling the President's story through the eyes of longtime friend Ward Hill Lamon, it's of interest only to serious history-hounds and techies curious about its unusual green-screen production.

The silliness of the conceit is far from the biggest problem in a picture that has no clue what to do with the wealth of talent in front of the camera.

A giant thud of a film that makes one doubt the fact that West ever directed a proper Hollywood movie.

Toilet humor, jokes about paraplegics and serious overacting make this lowbrow comedy an irritating watch.

Having tackled treacherous terrain to film Hayata's story, the filmmakers miss the opportunity to deliver a scorching testament to the dangers and passions that drive the saga.

Norm of the North is mildly diverting, although Pixar needn't be overly concerned.

Witless, sophomoric and relentlessly frenetic, 9 Dead Gay Guys... is about as funny and understated as its title.

Ultimately, the film doesn't succeed in its thematic aspirations, proving yet again that great literature doesn't usually transfer successfully to the screen.

Few films have ever ended on such a low, anti-climatic note as The Zodiac.

So formulaic and unoriginal that its poster should accompany the dictionary definition of derivative, The Gracefield Incident degenerates into endless scenes of people running around in the woods breathlessly shouting horror film cliches while being photographed in shaky-cam fashion.

Full of overwrought campery and vicious drag queens, K-11 feels in places like a deranged John Waters remake of "The Shawshank Redemption."

So blatantly not funny that it might as well have been called "National Geographic's Van Wilder 2."

The real problem here is not the shameless blurring of fact and fiction, but how unforgivably dull it all seems.

A loathsome redemption tale that rings false on every front except when depicting capitalistic assholery (and sometimes fails to convince us even then), Williams' directing debut The Headhunter's Calling (from a script by former corporate headhunter Bill Dubuque) not only expects us to root for its unlovable protagonist, but expects us to do so when that man is played by Gerard Butler.

Big, dumb, and boring, it finds the cowriter of Independence Day hoping to start a directing career with the same playbook — but forgetting several rules of the game.

It can be definitively stated that Dirty Grandpa is utterly unfunny.

Director Shackleton stages the ultra-violent mayhem with reasonable proficiency but little flair or imagination. And the less said about the dialogue...the better.

An action comedy that nearly renders the term an oxymoron, Killers is devoid of suspense and laughs.

It's no wonder that the film's strongest sequence, visually and dramatically, involves none of these characters. It's a flashback to the construction of St. Peter's that explains the origins of Eden's centuries-long reign on his dark throne.

The ideal animated film for Ron Paul to watch with his grandchildren, the bizarre Silver Circle certainly deserves points for sheer eccentricity.

Montiel treats his story's happily unsung oddballs with sincere affection. He doesn't hold them up to ridicule, or insist that they snap out of their quirkiness and conform. But he doesn't quite know what to do with them.

The film is ingratiating enough, but its main value is to make us eager for another, more substantial Shelton movie long before another decade has slipped by.

It’s contrived at every turn and talky like a French film, though 100 percent American indie in its earnest conviction that it’s saying something of substance about the unpredictable roller coaster of life and love.

Finally, a postfeminist multicultural musical extravaganza for 8-year-old girls. Is Bratz not the most totally stylin' movie ever? Grownups won't think so, but for their daughters who share a "passion for fashion" with the dolls that are giving Barbie a run for her money, it will be the event of the season.

An unmitigated B-movie that isn't thrilling enough or cheesy enough to make it worth the trip.

This tale of the theater could have used more time on the road.

With neither the dramatic nor comedic aspects of the story line being remotely convincing, the best efforts of the talented cast go for naught.

The sole laughs are scored by Robert Davi, amusingly playing it straight as a Muslim terrorist who wants to hire Malone to make a suicide bomber recruitment film.

Russell pulled off some outrageous moments in I Heart Huckabees, the feature he made before this film, but the evidence here suggests Nailed had issues even before the money ran out.

What seemed sharp and pointed onstage comes across pedantically in the film, which treats its subject with a clumsy heavy-handedness.

One of the most obnoxious and least necessary animated films of the century thus far.

Resembling something dwelling in the bottom of the remainder bin, The Seventh Dwarf is a garish-looking, slapdash mashup of an animated fairy tale.

One long wallow in sordidness.

Faith of Our Fathers is undone by its wobbly tone, hokey script and amateurish execution.

Too often settles for raunchiness instead of wit.

Clearly aiming for high artistic ground, the film doesn't even satisfy on an arousal level, with the discreet nudity and endless yakking not exactly proving a turn-on.

You'll never play the titular parlor game again after watching Would You Rather, director David Guy Levy’s clever exercise in torture porn that manages to display as much restraint as genuine sickness.

By-the-numbers retread.

Managing to make the films of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock look like dry, scholarly treatises by comparison, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed more than lives up to its subtitle.

Loud, mean-spirited and generally obnoxious, Son of the Mask makes the boisterous 1994 original look downright demure and refined.

Even during the climax, the film still is struggling to introduce the world of the film and its strange rules.

Director Benjamin doesn't really handle the material with the outrageous excess it deserves, with the result that the proceedings seem far too mild.

By the time the proceedings reach their "Paranormal Activity"-style violent conclusion, the viewer’s interest has long since waned.

Its low-rent cast and unappealing key art won't help at the box office, but viewers who stumble across it on cable may be pleasantly, if mildly, surprised.