Inescapable is like "Taken" without the tension.

With some momentary exceptions, Jack the Giant Slayer simply isn't any fun.

A good idea for a ghost story is dead on arrival in The Condemned, a would-be thriller whose intended horror-tinged chills register as ho-hum hokum.

It's hard to believe that the group who came up with the hard, clean edges of "Top Gun," sleek and unfeeling though it may have been, could make a picture as crude, as muddled, as destructo-Derbyish as this one. If Beverly Hills Cop II is its opening salvo, this is going to be a long, smoggy summer. [20 May 1987]

In the end, the difference between "Funny Games" and Hollywood schlock horror may only be a matter of breeding. Funny Games is "Saw IV" with a PhD.

Laurence Coriat's shapeless script...pads its overlong running time with standard teen trauma — band squabbles, girl betrayals, skinhead brothers — that saps the audience's energy before the grand finale.

The story goes slack onscreen, so much so that the movie's two-plus hours will seem an eternity.

Writer-director P.J. Hogan may have based Mental on an actual incident from his childhood, but the crazy quilt of a movie that resulted feels anything but real.

For all the ways Dickerson vigorously dramatizes the stages of solitary confinement — nervous humor, fear, rages, survival ingenuity (including a nifty breathing apparatus) — it's never enough to explain why this particular individual's story is worth telling.

There's plenty of action, some ping-ponging romance and even a bit of tension as Silver Circle spins its muddled tale. But it's all so overwhelmed by the rudimentary, computer-generated animation (characters don't so much walk as lurch and glide) that, well, the medium becomes the message.

Aside from preserving these folks for a presumably grateful posterity and convincingly depicting Austin as an open-air lunatic asylum, Slacker does not offer much to anyone who likes to stay awake.

Though the photographs are memorable, the photographer is not.

To be fair, there are moments that earn their laughs and nostalgic memories for the marriage that was and the relationship that is that are sweet. But like many big weddings — a lot of things go wrong and not much goes right.

The film is, perhaps, intended as a deadpan burlesque of race and class and beauty ideals...but it plays more as a boorish, overextended punch line.

The English Teacher is a tragedy masquerading as a comedy and doing a disservice to both.

Erased is eminently forgettable.

The climactic collision of agendas is even more contrived than everything leading to it.

Insights are few in this fan letter of a documentary.

Not clever or polished enough to be successful as farce, unwilling to supply any reason to care about any of its characters, unable to make the points about the role of fashion in society it thinks it is, "Ready to Wear" is madness without the usual Altman method.

A routine home invasion movie more interested in B-horror tropes and bloodletting than a thought-provoking look at "Hunger Games"-ish class warfare.

We're not sure what director Michelle Danner, who plays Herman's defensive mother in an uncredited role, wants us to get besides a reminder that angry boys act out for a host of half-defined reasons.

An action fan could be forgiven for the medicinal taste that this slick but dissipating exercise leaves behind.

It's not awful, but the high cost of a movie ticket these days seems like a steep price to pay for 90 minutes of air conditioning and production design.

This is a film that almost is not there.

When the outtakes at the end don't make you laugh, what does that tell you about the movie that preceded them?

Spears acquits herself as well as anyone might, in a movie as contrived and lazy as this one.

The result is a comedy of errors. Errors, yes. Comedy . . . we're not so sure.

Fat, homely men who feel they have been wrongly underrepresented in underwear ads should flock to The Last Man.

Formulaic new teen opus

A flat-footed film.

Has promising raw material to burn--and that's pretty much what's been done.

A broad and stale British crime comedy that wastes the considerable talent and presence of Minnie Driver.

A routine shoot-'em-up, with the triteness of Scott Busby and Martin Copeland's script exceeded only by the flatness of Steve Miner's direction.

A dreary indulgence. An unfunny satire set in the world of daytime soap opera, it isn't offensive enough to inspire passionate response.

Soon becomes a sadistic experience in its own right. Experiencing this pretentious wallow -- overwritten, under-thought and overdone -- is a very sophisticated form of torture.

If Penélope Cruz were any less attractive, maybe someone would have noticed how dull this mild, would-be romantic fairy tale has turned out.

Smartly shot in digital and transferred to 35 mm, suggests that Evans needs more seasoning to make genre conventions and characters work for him rather than against him.

As pretentious as it is hard-core specific, this fiercely anti-erotic film makes even the chilly "Eyes Wide Shut" play like "The Big Easy."

It ought to be delightful, but it isn't.

Lays thick, goopy layers of uplift on what should be lighter on the heart and stomach.

So exasperating in its contradictions, so frustrating in its fakery, so deeply irritating in its pretensions, it's frankly hard to know where to begin to dissect it.

All this sadness becomes so depressing to watch, testing the limits of the patience of even a viewer prepared to take Wang's underlying concerns seriously.

Asks us to spend 101 minutes with people most of us wouldtake pains to avoid in real life.

Where there was a modicum of charm to Mick Dundee's earliest exploits in New York City, the joke has withered as markedly as Hogan's face.

This is a Laura Ashley on Safari meditation on bored rich people searching for fulfillment and a new life among the photogenic wildlife of Kenya. Just wake me when it's over.

It's hard to tell if My 5 Wives is so completely dumb that it's impossible to be offended by it, or so completely offensive that it's just dumb.

Sporadically funny, often strange and almost never poignant.

Let's hope -- shall we? -- that the "true story" that allegedly "inspired" All the Queen's Men was a lot funnier and more deftly enacted than what's been cobbled together here.

It's easy to accuse Morrissette of condescending to a bunch of yokels, but hardly anybody would hold that against him if the result had been hilarious instead of deadly dull.

Works against its goals.

A kind of dirty fairy tale in which people with nasty attitudes inhabit a trash-talking, macho world of fast cars and complaisant women.

It's an awfully confusing journey, unless you're of pro-Digi-ous intelligence. Or a digimaniac. Or just 6.

So how then do you duplicate a magic aura from 30 years ago? You don't.

A standard issue undergrad gross-out comedy notable only for the showy role it provides Jason Schwartzman, well-remembered as "Rushmore's" geeky high school student Max Fischer.

What ensues is so glum and disjointed that the film becomes an even bigger mess.

Everything is stunningly photographed by John Mathieson, but to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a cockroach is a cockroach is a cockroach.

The gags, almost all of which involve the passage of gases and liquids, move at a fast-enough clip to keep you awake throughout. For which this review expresses a sorrow as profound as the sympathy it feels for all the actors.

Worth commenting on only for its shocking ineptitude.

A dreary tale of supernatural horror.

For histrionic wretched excess this movie would be hard to surpass.

Always a welcome presence in any film, Howard, as a simple-minded hick, gives Blackwoods whatever humor and life it has.

Soon enough, it becomes clear how much this movie disrespects both the audience and the genre.

If Superstar were meatloaf--and that would be an improvement--the recipe would be 4 pounds bread crumbs to 3 ounces sirloin. Make that chuck.

The latest in what feels like an endless string of movies ... in which the actor's parts have ruinously overdosed on sentimentality and schmaltz at the expense of humor and even sanity.

The bad news is that it's also vile, not to mention sophomoric and unfunny.

Rock is undisputably gifted and charismatic, but when Down to Earth takes his edge away, the film's energy goes with it. And without energy, no comedy can survive.

Feels more planned than passionate, scary at points but unconvincing overall.

The two leads are unappealing, the story is dragged on for days and the rather random magical element renders any human factor irrelevant..

There isn't much to Pokémon 4Ever.

Stillborn, pointless piece of work.

A knucklehead operation, all glands and attitude with no heart or brains.

It is an inept, inane Mafia comedy with a gay angle, all the more insufferable because director Kristen Coury and writer Joseph Triebwasser clearly think they're being wonderfully cute and clever.

The actors are game, but their roles lack color and depth, and it's a real struggle to survive Soul Survivors to the finish.

Teen sex comedies don't come more mindless than Joseph A. Pineda's Going Down, a movie so seriously underinspired it's hard to imagine it appealing to anyone but fantasy-prone middle schoolers who can barely wait to live it up like their older brothers and sisters.

A ditsy and dizzying spook-house thriller in high-tech, high-hemline gear.

So TV-movie-of-the-week that you wonder throughout why you can't use a remote to find a decent ballgame.

They (Brooks and Douglas) are so out of sync with each other that they seem to be looking for different movies to take their acts, though neither makes you want to see those hypothetical films. Not even as an option to this one.

Garmento has nothing going for it. First-time writer-director Michele Maher spent three years working in Manhattan's fashion industry...her attempts at satire are feeble and trite, and her stereotypical characters are without interest.

A lackluster international action adventure.

But what little humor there is in the movie becomes subservient to the grisly violence, gratuitous cruelty and ugly car chases.

You won't feel anything. Period. Oh, maybe bored or disoriented by the inside jargon and alien references that will be comprehensible only if you happen to have played the computer game on which Wing Commander is based. [12 March 1999, Calendar, p.F-10]

Too glib too often to make much of an impression any way you look at it.

There's nothing super about Super Troopers except for those deep into the low end of the frat-house mentality that equates smart-alecky with hilarity.

Whalin is awful, Birch is saddled with lines that would make a silent film star blanch and Irons devours huge chunks of scenery with the ferocity of one of those dog-fighting dragons.

Figgis certainly was after something different, but like "Timecode," in which four linked stories unwind in separate panels, Hotel proves to be a fundamentally insipid bid at experimental narrative.

Paymer and many others in a large cast are well-established players with strong credits, and they do the best they can to pump life into remorselessly glum material.

It's as sad and painful to report as it is to experience, but Hollywood Ending makes the conclusion inescapable: Woody Allen has become his own worst enemy.

Taking issue with efforts like The Salton Sea, cold and unemotional films that couldn't be more pleased at the opportunity to enthusiastically drag audiences through unhappy material, is as futile as getting mad at the wind.

Might have been offensive with its stereotypical, one-dimensional characters and Spanglish-laden "jokes" if it wasn't so utterly bland. With about as much flavor as iceberg lettuce, the movie really doesn't offer enough to get worked up about.

The Majestic isn't. Rather it's "The Film That Wasn't There," a derivative, self-satisfied fable that couldn't be more treacly and simple-minded if it tried. And it tries, oh, how it tries.

Unearthing even the roughest gems serves a programming purpose, but in this case it has also led to a theatrical release of a movie that looks like a muddy second-generation Xerox and contains all the emotional and intellectual appeal of cold tea and soggy toast.

Almost completely lacking in genuine thrills. Even the attractive presence of star Angelina Jolie can't keep this leaden, plodding, completely underwhelming film from playing like "Lara Croft: Yawn Inducer."

Pokémon isn't even good animation, unless the standard of measure is the crude LCD graphics of a Game Boy.

Absent one original moment and bathed in de rigueur steel blue punctuated by sporadic bursts of flaming orange, the movie is notable only for its creative approach to Seagal's bulky gracelessness: Not since "Apocalypse Now" has a film gone to such lengths to hide what its star looks like.

A misguided romantic serio-comedy aimed at women and gay men that ends up caricaturing both.

By coddling viewers and micromanaging our responses, The Other Sister shows almost as little respect for the audience as Elizabeth does for her feisty, underappreciated daughter.

Nearly as unwatchable as it is unpronounceable.

The only element that keeps the film from falling apart entirely is powerful physical presence of Pollio, an experienced, impassioned young actor.

Awkwardly staged and edited and fitted out with an overly intrusive score drawn primarily from classical music, the film consistently subverts the earnest efforts of its cast.

Decadence has rarely looked so pathetic, lethargic and dispiriting as it does in this listless film.

It's a glum, stale soap opera, tediously paced but mercifully running only 75 minutes, its sole virtue.

As the requisite love interest, Amy Smart gives the film's only professional performance, while co-star Eric Stoltz, as the story's villain, walks somnolent through the scenery with what seems to be barely suppressed mirth. Given the deeply unpleasant plot machinations and amateurish direction, the actor's amusement is understandable.

Serviceable trash. It looks and moves like a low-end action movie, complete with thumping soundtrack, nanosecond-fast edits, stunts that probably look scary to anyone who doesn't know better and even a third-act police chase through downtown L.A. In other words, it's Bruckheimer for babies.

Has nothing going for it -- and much going against it.

Whitney takes having it both ways to new heights -- depths is perhaps more like it. He satirizes reality TV while showing total nudity and at times carrying sex to the verge of soft-core porn. As titillating and energetic as the film is, it is also rather sad because it reveals what aspiring actors will endure for what they apparently regard as an opportunity.

Hollow, simple-minded and about as profound an experience as stepping in a pile of road kill.

Disastrously unfunny sequel.

Michael S. Ojeda's film is so relentlessly shallow and excessive that it hardly matters whether Lana is eventually able to turn the tables on Darko. When it rains in Lana's Rain, it pours -- and what comes out is trash.

Bill Murray completists, tots under 5 and their unfortunate chaperons are the only ones who need experience the soulless excuse for an entertainment called Garfield: The Movie.

Revelations of betrayals, faked identities and double-crosses come in waves in the last half-hour of Palmetto, but by then, the film has raised the one question it can't answer: Who cares?

The best advice to give anyone who wants to see Species II--other than "don't go!"--is "don't eat!"

Lacking most kinds of inspiration and geared to undemanding minds, this project is so overloaded with hardware and stunts, it's a relief to have it over.

Isn't remotely funny or pointed enough to qualify as satire. Intentionally or not, it comes across instead as a portrait of a man whose self-regard knows no limits.

Some movies should never come to light, either, and Darkness, bearing a 2002 copyright, might well have been better left on the shelf.

Neither acutely suspenseful nor particularly thrilling but instead mainly numbing.

It isn't insultingly bad; it's just incompetent.

A hokey doomsday/millennialist thriller.

It's astonishing how dull a movie that packs so much visual overstimulation into its frames can be.

Director Tamra Davis and screenwriters Sandler and Tim Herlihy scatter the bad jokes like fertilizer. Nothing sprouts.

Lifeless and laughless.

Deeply silly and tendentious.

With no plot, character or dialogue worth experiencing, let alone remembering, the film merely occupies space on the screen and hopes for the best.

Excess Baggage, a scruffy romantic comedy about a despairing rich girl who hatches a kidnapping scheme to test her father's love, is an aimless waste, a star vehicle without a compass. It wants very much to be both funny and poignant, but is more often just noisy and pointless. [29Aug1997 Pg 14]

A grimly unfunny and stupefyingly inept comedy.

The picture looks as murky as its story line, the sound is tinny, much of the dialogue is flat or confoundingly technical or merely risible, and most everything on the screen looks patently fake.

Derailed seems to want badly to be described as contemporary noir. But it's just pitch-dumb.

If Aeon Flux is what Charlize Theron does to pay the bills while otherwise being engaged in "Monster" and "North Country," it's probably a reasonable price to pay. For her. For us? No, no, no.

The only thing remotely resembling parody in this depressing waste of time and money is Jennifer Coolidge's sendup of Barbra Streisand as an over-the-top string of Jewish mother clichés.

It could have used several more passes on the screenplay to strengthen the gags and flesh out the characters.

Klasfeld has for his feature film debut churned out a lifeless series of sketch-comedy ideas that presumably would make even the Wayans brothers blanch at their broadness.

Hush is a would-be suspense film without a single major plot twist that isn't ham-handed. [9 Mar 1998, pg.F4]

Maple Palm cannot possibly be seriously recommended to anyone, but a reviewer, sitting through it until the long-awaited finish, cannot but be moved by how Stewart and everyone else involved has hurled themselves into the project with the utmost conviction, sometimes with unintended comical effect.

Originally titled "Fast Track" when it was scheduled to open last January, neither the wait nor the new title makes it worthwhile. The only fast track here is the one to home video.

Not so much phoned in as it is auto-dialed with a text-to-speech prerecorded message in one of those creepy robotic voices.

Murphy and his brother Charlie, who collaborated on the screenplay, seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from the latter's stint on "Chappelle's Show." Where Dave Chappelle used stereotypes to confront prejudice, the Murphys (and their co-screenwriters Jay Scherick and David Ronn) merely squeeze a few grudging drops from caricatures that were wrung dry in the age of vaudeville.

Ricki Lake, who occupies one of the lower links on the TV trash-talk food chain, is promoted to ugly duckling in Mrs. Winterbourne, a film that waddles through the movie-memory super-mart shoplifting everything but charm.

The Basketball Diaries is a lose-lose proposition. Although it masquerades as a cautionary tale about the horrors of heroin, this epic of teen-age * Angst is more accurately seen as a reverential wallow in the gutter of self-absorption.

Writer-director-producer Glen Stephens does occasionally have grim fun, but something as irredeemably sadistic as this packaged as entertainment is almost depressing.

The Salon is a cut below.

There isn't a moment of genuine suspense or tension in the film, and the paltry laughs are supplied not by Murphy but by Hardison, whose character, a lowlife Brooklyn habitue forcefully turned into the vampire's bug-eating sidekick, spends the entire movie moaning about his decomposing body and embarrassing the boss with his earthy patter. [27 Oct 1995, p.1]

The Quick and the Dead is showy visually, full of pans and zooming close-ups. Rarely dull, it is not noticeably compelling either, and as the derivative offshoot of a derivative genre, it inevitably runs out of energy well before any of its hotshots runs out of bullets.

When director Herbert Ross is away from his dance numbers, he lets the pace sag frightfully. A lot of good talent on both sides of the camera goes down with this PG-13-rated ship. [20 Aug 1990, p.6]

Walter Hill, who also directed the first film, surely recognizes the hollowness of what he's doing here. He tries to ram through the muddled exposition as quickly as possible; essentially, the film is wall-to-wall mayhem, with more shots of hurled bodies shattering windows than I've ever seen in a movie. [8 Jun 1990, p.1]

You can leave Days of Thunder feeling positively chafed. That clanking noise, however, comes from Robert Towne's tinny story and its malnourished characters. [27 Jun 1990, p.1]

Actually it's not a bad notion for a satiric comedy and this one begins well, but then veers entirely out of hand until it's as over-inflated as its own Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and as funny as a mugging. [23 Nov 1988, p.1]

The problem with UHF is that everything in it is a parody. The only logic for anything that happens is that there's some new thing to make fun of-mostly inanely. It's not much of a movie. [21 Jul 1989 p.11]

It's the movie business equivalent of encountering someone you once knew begging for money on the street.

Love is a many-splendored thing in Robert Benton's dull romantic fantasy Feast of Love, though none of its splendors rings true.

A grim, shrill, deluded and incredibly depressing movie, so bewilderingly mean-spirited that the trademark Farrelly Brothers gross-out scenes feel like the sweetest.

A stupor-inducing, would-be thriller from Japan whose sporadic action and inept storytelling is as generic as its title.

By any rational standard, this film is kind of a mess. Even if you agree with its politics, you will probably weep at the ineptitude of it all.

Despite the presence of funny guys such as Zahn, Garlin, Justin Long and Jonah Hill, along with veteran character actors Ernest Borgnine, Joe Don Baker and Robert Patrick, the movie fails to be even passably funny.

It isn't any good.

A tedious, by-the-numbers raunch-fest that exists strictly because it can.

As a horror-comedy, it boldly declines to scare or amuse.

The cast tries but rarely achieves an authenticity of emotional intimacy.

The film is awash in doobies and breasts, clichéd cinematic language and clumsy exposition. It's reminiscent of the stoner-culture movies of the late '60s and early '70s but without the naive fun.

Turning video games into movies may be one way for studios to coax teenagers away from their laptops, but this time around, the results are miserable, in every sense of the word.

It says plenty about how torpid the storytelling in Delgo is that the end credits are probably the best thing in the film.

Writer-director Susan Montford eschews all plot and character development for the hackneyed action scenes and grade-Z dialogue, while struggling to stretch the paper-thin story into a feature length film.

The rest of Seven Pounds feels like a half-hour "Twilight Zone" script that has been pressed onto a gob of Silly Putty and stretched to the sinking point.

Not fun, louder than it is scary, not even all that gory, this new Friday the 13th has Jason, all right, but otherwise it's missing nearly everything that made the original films work.

Even with the low expectations The Legend of Chun Li engenders, it still somehow manages to be a letdown.

A dippy clunker like All About Steve has no purpose other than as a challenge: If you laden a usually charming A-lister with a thoroughly off-putting, unhinged character, can she claw her way to likability? The short answer is no. The long answer is, what in the world was Bullock, who also produced the movie, thinking?

The whole thing plays like a bad Equity-waiver one-act.

Female sexuality has evolved into pure evil here with Von Trier looking ever so much like the Marquis de Sade of filmmaking.

Director/co-screenwriter Gabriel Bologna, working vigorously at hokey predictability, wastes little time getting us to wish his obnoxious characters (why do people who seemingly hate each other always vacation together?) would find their inner maniacs already.

A film so exhausting in its mean-spirited unfunny business that it would prompt Al Gore to empty his recycling bin and light a match to the contents -- and the plastic bin itself -- in full view of news camera crews.

As for the movie itself, it is better than the original "Cats & Dogs." But so is a rabies shot.

From its title, Alien Girl seems to promise some kind of playful intergalactic adventure. That, it is not. Rather the film is a grim, artless Russian-made gangster picture that is neither stylish nor fun.

It's rare to find a movie protagonist who singularly fails on every count to be a compelling, sympathetic or even understandable figure.

Wuershan's heavy hand, never letting up for a moment to allow any air or life to enter the film, cuts off the film's energy even as it rattles relentlessly on.

Enthusiasm isn't exactly a replacement for good sense or basic skills, and the film's truest mystery is why no one pulled Metcalf aside and suggested he keep all this to himself.

The scenario makes for an inept, lazy R-rated movie whose sole purpose is as a glossary of euphemisms for genitalia and sexual acts.

I fear the furry singing sensations may have finally run completely aground. If only they were truly stranded on that desert island…

The Devil Inside plays like a horror film conceived on graph paper.

The FP so desperately wants to be cultishly admired for its bad-taste rollout of wacko characters, ugly costumes and vulgar slang that it forgets to be genuinely offbeat or funny.

Dark Tide, directed with hopelessly flagging energy by John Stockwell, barely musters up enough interest to be thuddingly bad.

Lacking real kick, High School winds up as irksome as a bag of ditch weed and as lame as the pun of the film's title.

The patriot-packaged Last Ounce of Courage has been made with the conviction of true zealots, but also the competence of amateurs.

This poor film is so shamelessly manipulative and hopelessly bogus it will make you bite your tongue in regret and despair.

Vaguely misogynistic and defiantly paternalistic, the movie fails at nearly everything.

The best of the Alex Cross mess suggests that as an actor, he has the talent to move beyond the world of Madea should he want to. He just needs to look for much better material.

The storytelling, from a script by David Coggeshall, is at times nearly incoherent and relies too often on random scares.

This sloppy sentimental journey is long on beauty shots, short on depth and seriously intent on tugging your heartstrings. Indeed, it demands you reach for those tissues. Sob.

Saving Lincoln feels amateurish, strange and beyond redress.

This is Nancy Meyers territory, but leaden with passé observations about lovelorn women...and hardly ebullient as either oddball-pair comedy or housewife-revenge fantasy.

K-11 has the makings of a cult movie campfest but little of the authentic wit, edge or outré vision it would take to get there. What's left is a dreary jailhouse drama that somehow managed to imprison a few notable actors within its lurid walls.

Perry's ongoing disinterest in improving as a filmmaker is now seemingly part of his unshakable belief in himself, his insistence on doing his thing his way.

Without a human dimension to ground its construct, The Brass Teapot ultimately feels like an interminably stretched-out skit rather than a storybook lesson stained with blood and hurt.

6 Souls is regrettably sick with that familiar disease afflicting movies of this ilk: ostentatious, hollow moodiness that spreads like an unwelcome rash.

A predictable hodgepodge of uninteresting psychological cat-and-mouse, dimly lighted action.

Neither the film, nor the film within the film, hold our attention. Bummer, Keanu.

The conceit grows more strained, its Talmudic potential unrealized, while the comedy never rises above bleh.

It's not the worst idea for a revenge fantasy, but Jim's payback is so lacking in logic and reality, not to mention tension, that it proves more laughable than cathartic.

Lopez is a middling ringmaster of doom at best. But there's so little context to the litany of ugliness — some played for laughs, some meant to shock — that it's hard to discern where the entertainment value lies in any of this.

Chow is actually an apt metaphor for the movie - indescribably irritating and only in it for the money.

The script has no nuance, none. And when Shyamalan moves into the director's chair, the script problems are magnified. Everything is spelled out, underlined in red.

Lapses into an exercise in foolishness.

One of those movies that makes you want to throw up your hands in despair, disgust, or maybe both.

Supernova isn't so super.

A total waste of time.

Way too bleak to be funny, even as a contemporary satire of the battle of the sexes.

Skip it. Just fill in the blanks and you too can brew the same bland, goopy mixture, right down to such clunker lines as "There is a Santa Claus, Ma. He just doesn't come to Brooklyn anymore."

A haphazard film about half as sophisticated as the average beer commercial.

The thrill is definitely gone, leaving a disappointing and unpleasant mess in its place.

The Specials is an unfortunate name for a film that's anything but.

Struggles awkwardly to bring a twist or two to its hoary class-conscious story line, aiming for a subtlety in character development that's smothered by excessive kitsch and kink.