The trouble is that Jackson can’t make it mean very much: when every life on Middle Earth is seemingly at stake, few individually grab our attention.

Better than Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but not by an awful lot, and vastly less entertaining than Marvel’s current Captain America smash, it’s also curiously more sadistic, and seemingly less bothered about large-scale human fallout, than this once-spirited series used to be. Apocalypse isn’t quite the end of the world for X-Men fans, but it might be the end of the line.

It feels like a Blazing Saddles gag writ large – no bad thing – and the jab of Mel Brooks humour it provides feels considerably more inspired than the hackneyed split screens, freeze frames and wobbly zooms which are regularly deployed in the rest of the film for winking grindhouse cred.

The sheer half-heartedness of the whole exercise, though, may still catch you unawares.

The problem isn't a lack of weight, but of lightness. It's stuck with lead feet for a historical caper and serves no other worthwhile purpose.

Unlike certain past ventures of Knightley’s, there’s little or no sense of us being given a Big Performance, and she’s often rather moving as a result.

Perhaps the unexpected ascendancy of Trump is simply no laughing matter – there are precious few zingers hitting home on this occasion. Or maybe what’s demanded by Moore’s one-man leviathan hunting is a less rusty set of harpoons.

Despite a spirited score and a few other redeeming features, The Reckoning is too clumsy, overlong and generally miscalculated to add up to an intelligent commentary on misogyny, or a satisfying riposte to it

Every punchline is followed by a quiet pause for audience laughter, the lengths of which might kindly be described as optimistic.

This jumbled sequel, which was also directed by Carlos Saldanha, loses most of what made the first film such an infectious entertainment.

There are cameos from James Franco, Stephen Dorff, a comically moustachioed David Schwimmer and an unrecognisably hirsute Chris Evans as various lowlifes. A pity, then, that nothing else in Ariel Vromen’s movie is remotely on Shannon’s level, from the plodding, Scorsese-clone script to the needlessly lifeless editing and cinematography.

It’s testament to just how bad the original Super Mario Bros Movie was that this sequel can be a noticeable improvement in every respect – animation, storytelling, humour, vocal performances, you name it – while still comfortably qualifying as absolute rubbish.

The last thing you want to feel about the end of the world is that you’ve seen it all before.

Ritchie’s film...is so misshapen and inert, your imagination and memory never come close to being sparked by it. Just sticking with the plot soaks up every ounce of concentration you have.

The 3D photography is shallow and muddy, although a David Attenborough voiceover helps sustain interest.

The film is way too much like a never-give-up Saga commercial for its own good.

This second Fisherman’s Friends is not without its moments, but the aftertaste calls for a strong menthol lozenge.

If Sandler can’t find it in himself to be verbally or physically entertaining on set, you start to wonder why he’s there in the first place, although his hollow stare in a number of scenes suggests he may be pondering the same thing.

These catacombs are just an echo chamber into which any rubbish can be pumped, and while this gives carte blanche to production designer Louise Marzaroli, the relentless flow of subterranean non-sequitur becomes at least as trying as the whirling, jerky non-cinematography.

It’s the “rom” that’s the killing shortfall. But I must admit, Bros put me in such a sour mood that its “com” got sabotaged into the bargain. It’s distinctly smug about pitching itself as a landmark, while being really more of a setback, and a pretty low bar for the next one to surmount.

The issue here isn’t the moment-to-moment loopiness. It’s that the film’s cumulative unmanageableness soon starts to look like a put-on – Aster seems much more interested in pushing the limits of his audience, rather than his own.

Some of the action sequences are OK, the cast decent – but this convoluted action-adventure's poor attention to detail is its undoing.

Somehow, this celebration of early resistance to the Nazis, with its overbearing sentimentalism and lacquered, Oscar-hungry sheen, manages to trace the familiar contours of countless other dramas set in the period. Subtle this film is not.

The film contains deeply felt work by Hugh Jackman and Vanessa Kirby, but it’s an otherwise drab, simplistic, mechanical thing that wears its workings right on the surface.

Director Jake Schreier (Robot and Frank) deserves some credit for the spark and timing of his ensemble – the supporting cast, especially Abrams and Smith, come close to winning you over, but they can’t disguise the mechanical, one-sided insights where this story’s centre should be.

While a certain amount of drama is found in these revealing scenes, it is somewhat dis­sipated in the romantic relations between Leia and Solo....The dialogue given to the lovers is laughable, and their performances match it. So what is presumably intended as a great romantic finale comes to little, which might equally be said of the film as a whole....The appeal, perhaps, will be strongest to the young.

As a straight-up redemptive sob story with no other purpose, it cooks the books.

What you see in Dom Hemingway is exactly what you end up getting. It’s filthy, it’s shouty, it’s embarrassing, and you mainly want it to go away.