It isn't long, however, before the film's caricatured bad-guy shtick starts to wear gossamer thin, and an overabundance of "clever" twists-no one is [Yawn] who they seem to be! - begins to sap whatever little goodwill has been built up.

Students of minimal acting techniques can compare Marvin and Norris: impassivity versus vacancy. Students of the disaster film should write a short thesis on why George Kennedy is ubiquitous. Everyone else might wonder why the film is so virulently anti-Arab.

The star and co-director appears hopelessly out of place, trapped in a variety of awkward-fitting uniforms while forced to offer up laughably obvious battlefield advice ("Avoid gunfire!").

Waiting for Inescapable to finally reach its unearned, sentimental conclusion is a tiresome experience, but seeing Tomei submit to its badness is several measures worse.

If you loved the first one, you’ll happily sit through this one. It’s just not quite as good.

The ideas here aren't nearly up to the scratch that writers Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris established in Trading Places.

Anderson makes often-inspiring use of the 3-D effects.

The books' ingenious wunderkind is MIA here, replaced instead by a generic eye-rolling, motormouthed preteen bopping around rote set pieces.

There’s a way to make this kind of trashy noir work beautifully—was Wild Things director John McNaughton somehow not available?—but Serenity is too blandly generic to stick its snout in the muck and luxuriate, barring the occasional jail-baity line of dialogue from Hathaway (“You said I was finally old enough,” Karen whispers, reminiscing).

The movie dies onscreen; it might be the best advertisement for avoiding the glories of Italy ever released by a Hollywood distributor.

Sol Tryon’s dark, irrepressibly hilarious fable offers highbrow absurdism and low-budget filmmaking at their most clever and outlandish.

She never figures out what, exactly, the deal is regarding our short attention spans, but her ADD-afflicted film definitely provides evidence that they exist.

All of them slog through countless boring sword-and-sandal skirmishes, none of which feel remotely suspenseful, until the hugeness of it all becomes a mildly passable joke.

It's all too much and not enough—a succession of disparate, can-you-top-this episodes inelegantly piling up like skidding cars on a freeway. And that's not even taking into account the action scenes. Lord, those action scenes: Monotonous, loud and relentless, they're a punishing example of the self-satisfied, digitally augmented ephemera that typifies modern Hollywood moviemaking, and House Bruckheimer in particular.

Director Matt Russell shamelessly pitches woo to the already converted with an unholy barrage of heavy-handed flashbacks and phony Christian uplift. If any film ever needed a mulligan….

Cue those weepy violins. Indeed, you get everything you'd expect from this mostly saccharine melodrama.

Centrally, the title character remains an impressive piece of propwork, and Leonetti's restraint in never animating it (à la Chucky) is the only thing worth appreciating here.

As the screws turn, and the double crosses begin, the film sinks under the weight of its own ridiculousness. (The ever-reliable Cranston’s thick Euro-villain accent actually turns out to be one of the least ludicrous elements.)

The intensity of the melodrama here is undermined by a camp-ish turn from Robert Downey Jr as Morgan's leathered friend and by risible musical outbursts from Spader and Kim Richards.

Even by the broad standards of children's flicks, the film's prank-prone next-gen tween spy Rebecca (Blanchard) is one monstrous brat.

Impossible not to admire the total withholding of irony in Claxton's approach to this kamikaze project.

The problem, however, lies squarely with Portman herself, who (Oscar nod or no) seems unlikely to ever achieve a tone between histrionic and affectless.

[A] lamentable half-hour sit-com masquerading as a movie...No unexpected twists; very few jokes; not much talent. After the glory that was "Wayne's World", director Spheeris should be ashamed of herself.

The characters are flat; the voiceover is awkward.

But mostly, knock it for reducing Ice Cube to the tired sneer he’s been successfully avoiding in recent films, especially in last year’s Barbershop: The Next Cut.

John Barry's score, with its reiterated 'autistic kid' theme, would have sounded corny to Ivor Novello, though it's in keeping with the general principle of patronising the audience.

This Nickelodeon production may be designed for short attention spans, but must the characters have them as well?

A standout in smaller parts in films like "Kaboom" and "Atonement," this frizzy blond actor has the air of a star-in-training in search of the right opportunity. This isn't it, unfortunately, but Temple does turn what's essentially a magical-hussy role into something more grounded and human.