Beautifully outfitted and moodily photographed, the movie is directed by Stephen Hopkins, the Jamaican-born Australian responsible for Nightmare on Elm Street V. He keeps the pedal to the metal but never allows the explosive action to minimize his actors.

Director James Bridges and journalist Aaron Latham wrote the shoddy screenplay from Latham's cover story "Looking for Mr. Goodbody" and two other articles, none of which come together sufficiently to comprise a plot. You've got to wonder what they really had in mind with this marriage of ink and sweat. What next -- the "The 60-Minute Workout" with Morley Safer, or Arnold Schwarzenegger and "Meet the Bench Press"? [7 June 1985, p.29]

Filmmakers John Hughes and Chris Columbus go for repetition over comedy.

A Benji movie can't be the most boring thing under the sun, but while struggling to stay awake during something as tedious as "For the Love of Benji," now at area theaters, you begin to imagine that the minutes might pass more quickly and vividly if you were watching the grass grow or contemplating the horizons in Barstow or Wendover. [24 June 1977, p.B9]

Unhappily, the attractive twosome never give into the pull, just as this coquettish variant of "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" never arrives at its promised destination.

So programmatic, so dogged in hitting the right steps at the right time that it completely lacks spontaneity.

The film is visually mannered and full of posing and longueurs. But it is stylish, very French (despite its American origins) and diverting if well short of brilliant.

Newsies is all left feet, noise and clutter.

Vaughn is the film equivalent of a well-known novelist that no longer gets a good edit. He has the charismatic salesguy shtick down, but he needs a director who can rein him in.

Wonder Wheel may be scenic, but it goes nowhere — and slowly.

A few others have compared this to a James Bond movie, but it's more of a piece with a Tom Clancy movie; it never leaves the real world that far behind, it has a fair sense of documentary reality, and the action sequences -- from shootout to car chase to a commando takedown of a tanker on the high seas to a final knife fight -- are extremely well managed.

The film is, at times, almost sinfully fun, assuming you have a taste for self-indulgently logic-free hedonism.

Overwritten, overextended and clunkily symbolic

We're supposed to adore Gibson's sang-froid and his toughness, but everything, a few good lines aside, is so witless and monotonous it becomes numbing.

Unless you're a Clint fan there's little other reason to sit through this one.

"Dragon" was apparently meant to be a big, rousing musical comedy-fantasy, but it's staged and photographed without musical-comedy energy, flair or coordination. [17 Dec 1977, p.D7]

The war-movie cliches are as abundant as the antiaircraft fire, and the dialogue as wooden as a balsa glider. The leading characters are issued one personality trait apiece, and some don't even get that. Cuba Gooding Jr., for example, plays Maj. Emanuelle Stance as a man who smokes a pipe.

The stories are markedly different, but the acting seems remote and hollow, as if no one believes in what they're doing. [18 Oct 1996]

The result won’t sway nonbelievers, but is mostly watchable and occasionally even moving.

Upon this fine mess shines Janeane Garofalo like a ray of sarcastic sunlight as FBI agent Shelby...With her gift for sweet bile, the sardonic Garofalo makes every second on screen a treasure to be cherished.

One-dimensional archetypes, too much predictability and not enough comedy.

Linney -- this has happened too much to her -- is once again the best thing in a movie that at most achieves a certain mediocrity.

Ruffalo is so squirrelly in the role that he seems like a dead giveaway from the start. You know exactly where the story is going, and, dang, that's exactly where it goes.

A cautionary environmental tale with a thin veneer of entertainment on top. With its cotton-candy-colored palette of orange, pink and purple truffula trees, it looks like a bowl of fuzzy Froot Loops. But it goes down like an order of oatmeal. Sure, it's good for you. It's just not terribly good.

The artistry is enough to keep children and adults watching. It may help that Mario gains power by eating mushrooms — a good message about healthy eating, on the one hand, yet one with an obvious psychedelic resonance at the same time.

When the jokes work, it's for a simple reason: The four actors playing the couples are seasoned veterans of film comedy (although each is more than capable of handling dramatic roles, as well).

If your teenage sons are looking for heroes, send them to Toy Soldiers. Even if they're not, send them anyway. They'll probably enjoy watching a judge being thrown out of a helicopter. Too bad the judge didn't take the script with him. Most reasoning adults will probably reject this far-fetched clash between American preppies and Colombian terrorists.

By the end, though, the original bits fade as easily as one song bleeds into another.