Both assaultive and tiresome, A Good Day to Die Hard barely registers on the action movie Richter scale. It goes bang, it goes boom, and then it blessedly goes away.

The problem is quantity. There are so many action sequences related to so many story lines that midway through an epic fight, you might find yourself wondering what exactly started this particular battle and what the objective is other than destruction for the sake of it.

Kids will chuckle, for sure. But parents who were pleasantly surprised by the original film’s intelligence will miss Lord and Miller’s guiding hands, as what once felt so funny now leaves a stale taste.

What saves “Battle” from complete irrelevancy is the undisputable fact that a scrappy underdog formula tends to work no matter what time period or sport.

Bening and Harris are great actors, and they fill their roles as completely as they can, given the limitations of the soggy and implausible script by Matthew McDuffie and director Arie Posin.

White House Down never quite seems to decide what kind of movie it wants to be, although by firepower alone it qualifies as this summer’s most cartoonishly bombastic exercise in sensory overload (so far).

Bullock and McCarthy and the chemistry they generate are far more compelling than the movie they’re in. Too often the sketches go on too long, and the coarse, abrasive tone quickly begins to feel repetitive and off-putting.

Need for Speed is a piece of auto-collision pornography that weighs down its car-flip-and-massive-fireball money shots with a preposterous plot involving vehicular manslaughter vengeance.

Stoker plays out like a Kabuki “Macbeth”: gallons of style slathered on a story you already know by heart.

The film might take its name from poker subculture, but it lacks all the urgency, single-mindedness and swiftness that the title implies at its most literal. Runner Runner is a bummer. Bummer.

2 Guns feels like it’s all been done before, whether by John Woo, Michael Bay or any number of their CGI-happy clones.

D'Souza makes it all sound almost plausible, but only if you're predisposed to believe that Obama hates America. It's bashing, all right, but with a velvet-gloved fist.

Anyone much taller than a Smurf may turn blue long before its 81 minutes are over.

It would be dishonest to claim it isn’t funny. The laughs may come in fits and starts, usually by way of sight gags and set pieces, but they do come. And then they go.

Clocks in at close to two hours. It feels much longer. By comparison, Malick’s World War II epic “The Thin Red Line” tipped the scales at a whopping 170 minutes. But at least that 1998 film had people shooting at each other. There’s no such excitement here.

It’s exhausting. It’s also not particularly funny or engaging.

This outing does not suffer the epic badness one associates with films that aren’t screened early for critics, and in fact it offers moments of actual entertainment. It simply fails to exploit its assets: an amusing, revisionist take on the mythological strongman, and the charisma of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

The film is so thick with Jobs’s career highlights and lowlights that there’s little room for insights.

A movie that, despite its strenuous efforts to appear hardened and sexy and sleek, is unforgivably phony, talky and dull.

The aptly subtitled Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb is a blast of dead air and mummified humor.

The movie features not one, but two precocious children, a cloying stock character that should be used sparingly, if at all. And much of the dialogue sounds fake, veering alternately toward cutesy and overly cerebral.

The real trouble with Transcendence is that it just isn’t all that scary — at least not in the way that it wants to be.

A bustling, overly busy mess.

It seems that Andy and Lana Wachowski have never lost that childlike ability to dream. But they also haven’t mastered the grown-up power to rein it in. The story they tell in Jupiter Ascending could probably occupy an entire television season. There’s way too much here for one movie to hold.

While some of the stories are interesting, the film is much longer than it needs to be. For his part, Salerno tries to get creative with solutions for the lack of visual stimuli, but most attempts fail.

The movie has an Austen-like plot about an Austen obsessive. And while Hess laboriously checks off so many familiar scenarios...the film doesn’t have so much of what makes Austen transcendent.

Paul W.S. Anderson, best known for the “Resident Evil” franchise and 2011’s “The Three Musketeers,” creates harrowing simulations of the disaster. It’s enough to make you want him to ditch the story altogether.

The film isn’t awful. There are moments of handsome cinematography and occasional effects that both frighten and impress.

Ironically, When the Game Stands Tall isn’t about keeping gridiron glory in perspective, but about blowing it out of proportion.

The question at the heart of Deliver Us From Evil, a garden-variety serial-killer thriller tarted up as an exorcism drama, is not whether good will triumph over evil. Rather, it’s this: What in God’s name possesses good actors to make dreck like this?

What’s missing here is something, or rather, someone, to care about.

In addition to some trite set pieces, writer-director Dan Mazer serves up nothing more than conspicuous cynicism masquerading as comedy.

After paying good money to take your family to see this film, you may be dealing with some anger-management issues of your own.

Although The Other Woman nibbles around the edges of revealing truths about relationships, it leaves most of that potential behind, instead pursuing easy, exhausted cliches about zip-less marriages, upper class suburban drudgery, cynical careerism and dumb-but-sweet blondes.

The depiction of an always energetic and often furious Breitbart may please the man’s followers. But Marcus makes little effort to illuminate Breitbart’s character or motivation, so this high-pitched portrait ends up a little flat.

The film is ambitious and heartfelt, with pressing concerns about the virtualization and fantasization of reality. But it’s a blunder, one interesting mostly for what it might have been.

Ozon has created a monster that he can’t seem to let go of. Isabelle doesn’t just frighten her mother (and us). She seems to terrify Ozon, and I’m not sure I want to know why.

3 Days to Kill feels like two very different movies, neither of which is particularly good.

The movie’s action sequences are both thrilling and idiotic.

The best thing about awkward moments, after all, is that they usually pass quickly. And, blessedly, just as swiftly forgotten.

Adore at its core is a bore, nothing more.

We don’t expect a James Bond film to be deep, but at least we should be dazzled by the seductive gloss of its surfaces. Aside from that stunning opening sequence, this installment feels overcompensating and dutiful.

If for some reason you find yourself in a theater watching the martial arts adventure Man of Tai Chi...feel free to take a nap during the non-fight sequences.

Just a series of familiar scenes unfurling toward an inevitable conclusion.

Despite Blomkamp’s efforts to make some kind of commentary about the human soul, which the auteur bolsters with his trademark social consciousness — a tone of preachiness that, after three films, has worn out its welcome — the movie exhibits precious little humanity.

The Zero Theorem doesn’t fully earn the elaborately conceived scaffolding on which its relatively tame ideas are hoisted.

There’s some fun to be had, as long as your idea of fun includes being grossed out.

All of The Last Days on Mars feels like it’s been done before.

Watching Addicted is like eating Cheese Whiz straight from the jar. There’s no nutritional value. It’s kind of embarrassing. But it does satisfy a base craving for cheap, immediate sensation.

Even at its lamest and most entitled, this sequel will most likely please fans of the first installment, chiefly because Bateman, Sudeikis and Day are, admittedly, often very funny together.

Capital is too cynical to ever really suggest that redemption is possible. Not that anyone watching will even care.

Don’t expect to see a great film, or even a very good one. Whether you discover a meaningful channel with which to continue your walk with the film’s protagonist, however, is strictly between you and your god.

Even McAvoy’s reincarnation-obsessed Frankenstein can’t breathe vitality into this shallow adaptation, which careens from moments of horror to serious drama to attempts at comedy that don’t quite land.

This sharp left turn takes the films’ mythology in strange and not entirely satisfying new directions, including a crazy time-travel element.

There’s nothing sly about writer-director Le-Van Kiet’s scenario.

The film is probably of interest only to those viewers who, like Gondry himself apparently, already have an obsession with Chomsky.

Tyldum...isn’t a dynamic stylist as much as a competent executor of what’s on the page. He gets Passengers to where it needs to go, which is a resolution in keeping with a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it too, no matter how much credibility it strains, or how many political and ethical quandaries it elides.

The “Insidious” franchise, after three attempts to exorcise its real demons, still can’t seem to shake what really haunts it: the ghost of B-movies past.

So maybe some of this is hilarious. Heck, maybe all of it is. It will not be everyone’s cup of tea, and it was not mine.

Sabotage doesn’t exactly glorify violence, but it certainly does get off on it.

The big thrills and few laughs are no match for the cumbersome, convoluted story, not to mention the nonexistent chemistry between Cruise and Wallis.

The Boy Next Door plays best as unintentional comedy.

What’s truly regrettable about The Wedding Ringer is that, at certain moments, it almost succeeds as a heartfelt comedy about male friendship in which its two stars, Josh Gad and Kevin Hart, get to demonstrate that they can act.

Along the way there’s a sprinkling of humanizing moments.

Pan doesn’t deliver on its own promise. The movie doesn’t so much enhance our understanding of the flying boy as it demonstrates how little thought went into crafting his back story.

First-time director Trish Sie, a music-video veteran, is more interested in spectacle than character, as she demonstrates even when nobody’s dancing.

Reiner assembles a square meal of rom-com pleasure points, but it’s bland, by-the-numbers and not particularly memorable.

The movie’s editing mishaps, unbelievable scenarios, overuse of music and computer-generated fakery distract from what should be a great ad­ven­ture.

Knight of Cups may want to be understood as the portrait of a man plunging beneath the veneer of modern life, but it can just as easily be perceived as the self-portrait of a filmmaker in his own Versailles, letting himself eat cake and having it, too.

Song to Song is a painful movie to watch, not only because it’s so dithery and overlong, but because it reveals Malick to be a filmmaker far more interested in surfaces than his vaunted intellectual depth would suggest.

Writer-director Rupert Goold, here making his feature debut, fails to capture the chemistry and tonal complexity necessary to make this grim, often grisly tale anything more than a tragically lurid anecdote.

Tusk seems to harbor no grander ambitions than to create a gross-out gag.

People don’t go to Sparks movies for subtlety; they go to warm their hearts by bearing witness to true love. Of course, that requires a story that rings true. In The Longest Ride, authenticity is in short supply.

For all its intimations about finding one’s true self and the complicated setups for a big misidentification, The Pretty One is just another romantic dramedy.

The Hateful Eight never lives up to its intriguing opening minutes and provocative premise, its wide-screen canvas wasted on a talky, claustrophobic chamber piece that descends, in due Tarantino fashion, into a mean-spirited slough of bloodshed and mayhem.

Strip away the trite character beats, rote plot points, random dream sequences and other narrative padding, and “Batman v Superman” comes down to the actors, their characters and whether they can sustain interest over the long haul. The answer is yes, if they wind up in the hands of filmmakers blessed with authentic imagination rather than serviceable technical chops.

What Polar Bear really lacks is hindsight. It is a little girl’s valentine to her father, without the benefit of bittersweet wisdom that comes with age.

Although Boniadi makes Shirin nearly as likable as she’s supposed to be, writer-director Ramin Niami’s movie is crudely contrived and sloppily edited.

Intriguingly, Jinn makes a plea for understanding and cooperation between Muslims, Jews and Christians. Disappointingly, writer-director Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad does all too good a job burying that message within a blustering supernatural thriller.

The film by the stylish fantasist Guillermo del Toro looks marvelous, but has a vein of narrative muck at its core.

As Above, So Below is inherently absurd, but it would be somewhat less so had it fully committed to just one of its ridiculous premises.

Visually, Brick Mansions is a duller and more conventional film than “District B13,“ which was, if nothing else, a sourball-flavored form of eye candy.

The film is artfully shot with eye candy galore: sumptuous dresses, beautiful people and scenes from Pierre and Yves’s time in Morocco. But for all its visual stimulation, the story does little to awaken emotions.

The Brothers Grimsby is fitfully, sometimes outrageously, funny. But Cohen’s shtick of showing the backwardness and stupidity of unprivileged characters is starting to feel lazy, not to mention classist itself.

The Signal has visual style to burn. And it takes good advantage of the current state of paranoia arising from our surveillance culture and the pervasive mistrust in government. On paper, this sounds like a good formula. If handled well, it could really pay off.

The plot is paint by numbers, which puts pressure on the comedy to deliver. But it doesn’t.

For all the movie’s grandiose annihilation, there also is action so absurd and emotion so saccharine that the likelihood of involuntary laughter is high.

Whether it’s being sexy, jokey or homicidal, Stage Fright doesn’t deliver the goods with sufficient spirit. It lacks the sparkle to be a truly killer show.

Ultimately the movie feels like an empty exercise. Sure, it’s a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of fame. But when the one figure most worthy of our sympathy is nothing more than a beautiful blonde robot, what’s the point?

As is true with so much of Haggis’s work, Third Person suffers from an airless, too-neat lack of connection with organic life.

Mortdecai succeeds more as a talky farce than an action-packed adventure. But it would be even better if Mortdecai weren’t about Mortdecai at all.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is the cinematic equivalent of trying on your prom suit from 1984. Maybe it still fits, but not in the places it used to, and if you try to moonwalk, you’ll probably get a hernia.

Baby Boom is an '80s fable based on a beer ad philosophy.

This summer Bullock is in the driver's seat of The Net, a sort of chase movie on the information highway from veteran producer-turned-director Irwin Winkler, and not only is the film a comedown, it's a far less flattering showcase for her talents as well.

Even as characters are tweaked and actors bring a slightly different energy than his other movies, The Best of Me is still the same mushy Nicholas Sparks adaptation with drama so overwrought audience members can’t help but laugh — at least until they’re sniffling during the closing credits.