A sequel every bit as clumsy, ham-handed, outlandish and laughable as the original was sleek, tough and efficient.

Even likable actors can’t obscure the fact that, holy gods on Mount Olympus, this thing is a slog, a movie that dutifully hits its plot points involving prophecies and fleeces without evoking a whiff of spirit or imagination.

Mainly for those who are already infatuated with Cena's stoic, Mount Rushmore-esque countenance and who do not find the idea of the big lug leaping off the edge of a cliff onto an airborne helicopter's landing gear remotely absurd.

A shapeless collection of encounters with Texas prison inmates and their victims, what could have been a well-aimed examination of the most troubling contradictions of capital punishment instead becomes a maudlin, unrestrained wallow.

So didactic that viewers are likely to feel less uplifted than lectured.

With Casa de Mi Padre, it's often hard to tell the difference between when it's making fun of bad movies and when it's being one.

A 90-minute theatrical release from Nickelodeon Productions that, if anything, should have aired as a half-hour Nickelodeon special.

McCarthy’s willingness to go to the mat notwithstanding, it’s viewers who are likely left feeling punched in the gut.

For all its playfulness, the new RoboCop can’t help but lack the novelty of the original’s jolting mixture of dumb-smart irony and visceral pulp.

When the film isn’t sloppily directed, it’s a series of lazy filmmaking tics, including fetishistic slow-motion shots of blood, water and sweat, as well as sundry dismemberments, impalings and decapitations.

To make matters worse, this third “Hangover” is dull.

The high-school sports drama Crooked Arrows has two -- but only two -- original selling points: Its protagonists are Native Americans and the sport in question is lacrosse. That's something you don't see every day. Other than that, however, the film's moves are taken straight out of "The Bad News Bears" playbook.

For all of The Equalizer’s overkill, Washington retains an admirable air of seriousness, embodying McCall as a believable figure of purity and protection, even when he’s going after his opponents with methodical, thoughtfully choreographed sadism.

"Bridesmaids" may have been crude, but it also said something about female friendships that felt true. Bachelorette feels like it's about four women who, not even all that deep down, can't stand one another.

A workmanlike, if treacly and overblown, piece of propaganda. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the degree to which you already believe its talking points.

The whole thing is played for laughs that almost never come. To be sure, the film has its moments, but they’re few and far between.

After the movie limps along for an hour and a half, Besson suddenly switches gears and does what he does best.

An ineffective excursion that maintains a few direct ties back to the original film but never moves the story forward.

More sluggish than a funeral barge, cheaper than a sale at K mart, it's a nerd, it's a shame, it's Superman IV.

The most objectionable thing about Only God Forgives isn’t that it’s shocking or immoral, but that it’s so finally, fatally dull.

Even though it earns an R rating for profanity and some risque material, it’s too meek and mild-mannered to qualify as brave, or even slyly subversive.

It’s more silly than scary.

Diana isn’t just an egregious case of rewriting history, but one of oversimplifying it.

Producers David and Jerry Zucker have shown with "Airplane," "The Naked Gun" and "Top Secret" that they are inspired film parodists. Brain Donors suggests that they are clumsy plagiarists.

The message of The Ultimate Life could be summed up on a greeting card. Or rather, 12 greeting cards.

It’s an air-kiss of a movie, one that places a non-contact peck on either side of its subject’s mouth, then breezes off before a serious conversation can begin.

The only thing that distinguishes this teen-magnet wannabe from its predecessors is how lazily it appears to have been slapped together.

As he proved with his misbegotten A Million Ways to Die in the West, MacFarlane is essentially a guy who’s gotten appallingly lucky on television. He exhibits zero proficiency in cinematic staging and no sense of pace.

Juvenile, disjointed and pointlessly revolting at times, although there are a few moments of disturbingly stark visual beauty.

Carpenter being Carpenter, he vacillates between overexplanation -- his are the most verbose horror films -- and cheap shocks.

An insensitive, unfunny cringer from the entrepreneurial writer-director that should have come with a gift receipt.

The intentions for I’m in Love With a Church Girl may have been noble, but nearly every part of the delivery turns out to be flawed.

The movie feels like Nicholas Sparks fan fiction.

The special effects look cheap, the acting is wooden, and the shouted dialogue consists largely of throwaway action-movie cliches (“Let’s do this”) and B-movie sci-fi jargon (“His bioenergy is off the charts!”).

The film defies one of the fundamental rules of capitalism: Exploitation of the proletariat may be well and good, but don’t execute them all. At the same time, “The Purge: Anarchy” obeys a cardinal law of Hollywood: Shoot first and ask questions later.

Wondrous visuals only go so far, in a film that turns out to be lethally dull.

With a bench this deep, This Is Where I Leave You should have been a comedy of contemporary manners as wickedly funny as it is poignant. In the hands of Levy, it’s become just another forgettable example of low-stakes Hollywood hackwork at its most bland, banal and snipingly belligerent.

Despite classy lead performances by Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde, the movie, from horror factory Blumhouse (known for cranking out sequels in the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, among others), relies too heavily on reanimated monster movie cliches and scientific gibberish to keep it alive.

Lazy, scattershot and excruciatingly unfunny, the movie is a hazard to the very young, who might come away with the erroneous impression that movies don’t get any better than this.

This biblical action drama that feels excessive in every way imaginable, from running time (nearly 2 1/2  hours) to melodramatic acting to the conspicuous amount of computer generation.

The Gunman may start as a genre exercise of promising purpose, but it winds up being just a lot of bull.

Paquet-Brenner has assembled a talented cast.... Yet he elicits mostly unmemorable performances from just about everyone involved.

Cooper and Lawrence do their best, but the material consistently works against them, from the overwrought dialogue to the never-ending plot twists in place of character development.

Somewhere on the incoherent pu pu platter that is Cameron Crowe’s Aloha, a nifty romantic comedy congeals and shrivels, inexplicably untouched.

The self-conscious affectation of the film would be funny, were it not so smug.

Ultimately, How to Be Single feels reverse-engineered to justify its ending, which while admittedly gratifying, can’t accurately be described as happy. For that, it would have to be worth the contrivances, cliches and tedium that have gone before.

Animated in form but completely listless in content.

Salva certainly gets points for creative repurposing. Much of what transpires in Dark House has been seen before, just not all in the same movie.

[A] strained, clunkily orchestrated and dismally retrograde film.

Some of the dancing really is spectacular. Scenes from the competing clubs include impressive choreography and gravity-defying moves. If only the poorly delivered, trite dialogue and predictable plot aimed as high.

The November Man turns out to be the classic August movie: a triumph of competence over imagination and schlock over taste. Its highest value lies in reminding filmgoers that fall can’t come too soon.

It takes a very special director to make scenes of sky-diving, free climbing, big-wave surfing and BASE jumping something to yawn at. Yet Ericson Core must be that kind of miracle worker, because Point Break, his update of the 1991 cult classic, is basically a cavalcade of extreme sports, but with less drama than a highlight reel.

The camera style is grotesquely overwrought, a relentless exercise in technique for technique's sake. It's all here, folks: fancy wipes, expressionistic angles, quick-cut close-ups, stylized backlighting, camera moving in endless illogic. It's as if a 15-minute history of film technique had been compiled by a psychotic. [19 Mar 1986, p.B9]

Fox's performance is a shadow of his "Future" self, and the rest of the cast -- everyone from teeny-boppers to wise guys to baffled adults -- are equally benumbed. You really can't blame them, what with a screenplay by Joseph Loeb III and Matthew Weisman that relies on "losing control of his bodily functions" for its biggest laugh. [24 Aug 1985, p.C6]

At every turn, the movie is less moving than the real-life events that inspired it.

Despite its deficiencies, Annabelle is not without a modicum of verve. It has its unnerving moments, but they’re outweighed by the sheer stupidity and predictability of the story.

The first “Transporter” delivered an unexpected kick, courtesy of Statham, who made for a brooding, magnetic — and reliably kinetic — action hero. Skrein is an inferior stand-in, scowling like his predecessor, but lacking Statham’s cool, coiled power.

The threat that this mess of a movie might be followed by a sequel is enough to make anyone cry uncle.

Sexist, racist, overlong, dull, visually ugly and, worst of all, unfunny, “Kasbah” squanders its cast.

The movie — which looks and sounds like a more brutal Bond knockoff — is at least consistently stylish, though its tone is less assured.

A glorified infomercial in defense of the holiday that contains about 15 minutes of actual content padded out with almost an hour of filler.

Like its brain-damaged protagonist, Criminal just shouts and shoots its way into, not out of, an oblivion of illogic, plot holes and emotionally unengaging scenery-chewing.

Yes, it’s all in good fun. And there’s a certain verve to the way Lynch handles the violence, even if he’s less of a stylist than Tarantino. But the film’s brutality... is so excessive, even if tongue-in-cheek, that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Good camerawork only goes so far. Love drags on and on, alternating between arguments and intimacy, breakups and makeups. The movie never passes the authenticity test; if this is what sex feels like, we’ll all soon be extinct.

It isn’t unusual for a good premise to have a faulty execution. The Benefactor suffers from a conclusion that feels inauthentic to the real perils of addiction, as well as to its own story. The only remarkable thing about it is Gere, who really should stick to filmmakers worthy of his talent.

It’s a shame that the beginning of a movement that has come so far, so fast has been reduced to a trite, calculatingly manipulative reenactment.

You and your kids could probably craft a richer, more exciting polar bear adventure using nothing but Klondike bar wrappers and the power of the imagination.

Of course, action movies don’t have to be believable or poignant. They just have to get your adrenaline pumping. But the movie lacks inspiration in that department, too, owing to action sequences you’ve seen before, familiar music and dialogue so predictable you could make a game out of guessing the next line.

Despite flashes of brilliance, Why Him? is perfunctory and boorish, the sort of film that already has begun to fade from memory before you’re too annoyed by it.

Even by the forgiving standard of stuff-we-sit-through-for-our-kids, Ratchet & Clank falls short.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers is a prime example of the principle of diminishing reruns.

Neither Grint nor the hoax subplot are compelling enough to hold our attention. Perlman, on the other hand, is a commanding, if peripheral, presence, diverting the focus of the film from silly historical speculation to the tale of a damaged psyche.

All the air has gone out of Rocky, something Stallone, who also wrote and directed, seems to realize -- he won't leave his movie alone. It's riddled with hapless gimmickry: zooms, slow motion, double images, freeze frames, embarrassing MTV-style montages, a noisy, aggressive sound track, and flashback after flashback to the movies that have gone before, in order to remind you why you're there, as if to insist, "See, this used be a good idea." [28 Nov 1985, p. E1]

If anything, Baywatch is a litmus test for how low Johnson can sink while still winning us over.

Despite an army of appealing actors in its large ensemble cast, the rom-com Mother’s Day is startlingly unappealing. Clumsily edited and culturally tone deaf, it’s more obsessed with the titular holiday than even most mothers would find reasonable.

Watching “Transfomers” is like sitting in a car that’s revving its engine while stuck in the mud. It sounds like it’s getting somewhere, even though all it ever does is spin its wheels.

The jokes in Ktown Cowboys land with a thud.

Somehow channeling the tone of both a Lifetime movie and an after-school special, Mothers and Daughters shambles into theaters oozing schlock and melodrama, just in time for Mother’s Day. This is no way to honor a beloved family member.

If Refn is trying to skewer our cultural fixation with youth and good looks, his blade isn’t up to the task. The Neon Demon attacks, but indiscriminately. It’s sharp-looking but dull, hacking and plunging every which way, yet drawing no real blood.

From the Land of the Moon features a typical Cotillard performance, yet the romance, from French actress and filmmaker Nicole Garcia, manages to convey neither triumph nor tragedy.

Unfortunately, this film’s dark premise is drowned in whimsy and a forced childlike wonder.

Jokes about race, women’s anatomy and little people are sprinkled, like rancid pepper, over a script that depends on the inherent humor of cuss words. Not that coarse language can’t be funny, but here it appears to be evidence of a toxic mix of laziness and sociopathy, not defiance of seasonal propriety.

Most of the time, though, the movie is too busy being saucy or sappy to even look at its target.

The more invested you are in the old-fashioned Robin Hood of legend — the less likely you are to enjoy what amounts to a chilly and flavorless frappé of historical speculation, revisionist folklore and every lazy action-movie cliche ever written.

Guaglione and Resinaro strive to find meaning in Mike’s struggle, even when the script and its conclusion all point to a message that is more senseless, even bleak.

Ed...is thrown together with such little concern for originality or its audience, it's appalling.

Warning: If you have seen neither “Unbreakable” nor “Split,” you may be utterly and irredeemably lost. Shyamalan cares not a whit about — and is probably incapable of making — a stand-alone film that will appeal to a general audience. This one is for the die-hards.

Its exuberant, enthusiastic energy seems to belong in an entirely different movie.

Escapes is an eccentric portrait of a not especially eccentric — or even terribly interesting — subject: Hampton Fancher.

The script screams of a thinly written, ’90s-era narrative reanimated for audiences who now expect more depth from their action movies. The final product is less a technical marvel than an ambitious experiment gone wrong.

I Feel Pretty suffers from a fatal flaw: its premise.

Summer Rental is the kind of movie that could make you wish you had poison ivy -- at least the scratching would occupy your mind. [10 Aug 1985, p.D7]

As you watch Howard the Duck, you get the vivid sensation that you're watching not a movie, but a pile of money being poured down the drain. [02 Aug 1986, p.G10]

The Blue Lagoon is a plump sitting duck, waiting to be roasted by sarcastic spectators. But director Randal Kleiser and his associates may enjoy the last laugh at the box office if this oblivious romantic idyll connects with susceptibilities as naive and dumb-founding as their own.

There are no sparks in Blind Date. And the script, written by Dale Launer (Ruthless People), is so devoid of laughs it's impossible to understand why Willis chose it for his first film outing. [02 Apr 1987, p.B11]

Smokey and the Bandit II -- is a premeditated embarrassment. It seems to prove that entertainers who discover a successful formula may not have the foggiest notion of how to protect, duplicate and sustain it.

The Amityville Horror is a feeble excuse for a haunted-house thriller, but given the source, who could ask for more?

If any one made a respectable effort to invest this story with authenticity or tension it is not apparent on the screen. Even the big spectacle, the demolition of a dam, is going to look unimpressive to moviegoers who've already been to Superman and seen the identical illusion depicted with far more skill. Force 10 is a mission that should probably have been aborted. Instead it's been allowed to abort on the screen.