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.

The finished film obliterates whatever promise of novelty and human interested existed in the basic idea of Belinski's culture shock. If the rabbi's odyssey was embryonically appealing, the filmmakers have nurtured it along pact from an elephant trying to hatch a robbin's egg. [27 July 1979, p.B1]

The scriptwriters try to conjure some history/mythology to validate the plot's twists and turns, but the whole thing ends up more confusing than Days of Our Lives on fast-forward.

Even in this conglomerate era of marketed, predigested mediocrity, this Disney movie slips instantly into the humdrum.

There's not much adventure on these high seas. This buccaneering boondoggle is more like a slow voyage aboard the PMS Pinafore. [22 Dec 1995, p.C06]

Overstuffed, overlong and utterly uninvolving, this is a movie that feels as morbidly trapped as the poor little bird of its title. Rather than spread its wings and fly free, it stays frustratingly, eternally inert.

A rotten 89 minutes of night photography and close-ups of a man with the face of a dessicated bulldog. There's no kick, just sick: people who weren't being paid to watch walked out of the screening. [23 Apr 1982, p.13]

This time around, there's barely any plot, just excuses for Bronson to blow people away.

Grecian Formula and body corsets notwithstanding, Bronson looks like one of those sculpted potato heads and moves with appropriate grace. This is not the face of death; it's the face of old.

This tedious slog through the highland muck should win no Oscars, only groans and raspberries. Even the much-buzzed-about glimpse of a nude Pine, as his character emerges from a lake, doesn’t make this worth watching.

This is a movie that doesn't just make you feel dumb, it makes you feel as if your head has been hollowed out and pumped full of Cheez Whiz.