A winning narration (read by Greg Kinnear) holds things together. And there's just enough script for a good cast to run with. Harris and Madigan lift the whole enterprise just by being who and what they are - great actors.

Absurdly long, absurdly over the top and absurdly absurd, Five Five - still manages to be more fun than any movie with its outrageous carbon footprint has any right to be.

The funny moments outnumber the warm ones. There's a touch of religion and plenty of melodrama, especially in the contrivances of a cluttered and drawn out third act.

Never graduates to the uplifting tale it sets out to be.

This is still a most original take on the consequences of following your own "yellowbrickroad" when you don't know, for sure, that there's an Oz at the end of it.

Not a neat and tidy thriller. It is a most engrossing one, commanding our attention even as the filmmaker tries to slip this or that hole in the plot past us.

Taken on its own merits, this profile of "Buck" Brannaman is a pleasant and touching but somewhat superficial insight to the man and his methods.

It's a bit long to be as kid friendly as this educational and visually striking film is meant to be.

Moon delivers the popcorn in gigantic fist-fulls of fun.

A perfectly pleasant but fluffy, inconsequential romantic comedy.

The finale to the Harry Potter saga is, like most of the films in the series, a bit of a slog. But it's a generally satisfying slog.

Does well in capturing the cruelty of school life and the assorted "types" who inhabit schools there and here. But it's more twee than clever, more affectionate than romantic and more promising than satisfying.

That it lacks the snap, crackle and kapow of the summer's better comic book blockbusters isn't surprising. With all this effort riding on a big, expensive and rushed studio summer picture, the real miracle is that any of them come to life.

Haters, head for the door. But Gleeks? Get your "Glee" on.

There's too much cheese, but there are still enough amusing action beats and funny one-liners to let one say, 30 Minutes or Less delivers, more or less on time.

Entirely too literal, but it still manages to be a literally hair-raising piece of modern-style old school Gothic horror.

The unfailing sweetness of Paul Rudd's lead performance makes what could have been another raunchy and rude R-rated farce a bracing change of pace in a summer of aggressive comedies about aggressive people, from "Bad Teachers" to "Horrible Bosses."

There is little urgency to this spiraling disaster. Soderbergh has made a lot of noise this past year about quitting directing and taking up a less collaborative, more solitary pursuit - painting. This is an anti-social painter's movie. Millions are dying, but he doesn't care that much. So why should we?

Best of all, the filmmakers took the time to give these hard men just the right things to say - not catchphrases, just lines that smell of blood and gunpowder every time Statham, Owen or DeNiro utter them.

No, this isn't how it really happened. But director Charles Martin Smith ("Air Bud") wrings plenty of heartfelt tears and a few laughs out of this fictionalized account.

Brewer gave the film a little Southern hip hop, and brought in real Southerners Quaid, Andie MacDowell and Ray McKinnon to further Southernize it.

What this film from the director of "The Devil Wears Prada" does manage is a gentle amiability.

This tiny Catholic school for women dominated the sport at a turning point in history, and this plucky, old-fashioned sports drama sets the scene and tells the tale with a lot of heart and a dash of wit.

Though it only rarely reaches the level of gonzo farce that it might have been, "Diary" is still an agreeably drunken stagger through the novel Thompson based on his formative year as a writer.

"Gattaca" director Andrew Niccol's sense of the zeitgeist is as on the money as ever with In Time, a sci-fi parable that plays like "Occupy Wall Street: The Movie."

Fortunately, director David Carson and screenwriters Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga (all of whom have served in the Star Trek universe) keep the longueurs to a minimum. Whenever you feel like beaming up (or is it out?), they switch scenes.

It's a fairly effective melodrama with an inventive visual design, swift pacing and convincing performances by Liam Neeson (as Westlake/Darkman), Frances McDormand (as Westlake's girlfriend) and Larry Drake (as the heavy). [24 Aug. 1990, p.4]

Whatever its virtues, Eli is a movie that can’t help but suffer in comparison to the much-delayed and much better "Road."

It begins with such promise, a kinky modernist twist on a classical sci-fi morality tale. That it degenerates into conventional, genre horror is all the more disappointing.

An odd duck of a thriller. Quiet, talkative, with the occasional explosion of violence, it has ghosts and characters philosophizing, quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald or blurting insensitive non-sequiturs.

Green Zone isn't so much a bad movie as a misguided one.

The "Made of Honor" screenwriters don't deliver enough jokes or feisty exchanges between the ill-matched traveling companions.

At two hours and 15 minutes, the new Karate Kid takes an absurd amount of time to get to that “big match.”

Extraordinary Measures isn’t extraordinary. It’s simply safe.

Basically a bloody buddy picture that tries too hard.

For what it is and for whom it is intended, it’s not a bad movie, just an indifferent one.

After "Zombieland," The Crazies struggles to find novelty and laughs, and must battle the overwhelming sense that we’ve been here, seen this too often and too recently to experience any real surprises.

There are a few sensitive scenes, but it’s the big blasts of raunchy that deliver its laughs.

It’s not a great film, with some edge Sparks put in the novel left out of the script. But there’s real chemistry between the young lovers and an old fashioned virtue to the father-daughter, father-daughter’s boyfriend scenes.

An awkward blend of ultra-realistic violence, boundaries-bending satire and low comedy.

O’Loughlin is the very definition of comic dead weight. Imagine making Greg Kinnear carry half of "Baby Mama," or sending Tina Fey out with Matthew Fox on "Date Night" and you’ll get the picture.

Jackie Earle Haley, the fans' choice to take on the role of Freddy Krueger in the remake of the 1984 boogeyman blockbuster A Nightmare on Elm Street proves stunningly, rousingly…adequate…for the job.

If “the gals” have to bow out, at least they try to do it in a sprint -- in their Manolo Blahniks. It’s a pity nobody told them you can’t run in heels -- in sand dunes.

Forever After still goes down like warmed-over porridge. You don’t have to be Goldilocks to think that this time they’ve cooked their Golden Goose.

Kilmer makes a worthy, if somewhat underscripted villain. And some of the bits -- MacGruber idiotically setting traps that the bad guys never fall for -- tickle. But this still feels instantly dated, a "Hot Rod in a Role Models" era.

It has humor and a touch of charm, but plainly needed more love, more passion, more Shakespeare.

Brolin is so damned good in the saddle, in the hat and in the part that a half-sober viewer could half forget how half-arsed this movie he's starring in is.

It's so sentimental and sweet that you can almost forgive the kids' comedy Ramona and Beezus for not being nearly funny enough.

It's still a short-enough time-killer of a thriller -- not the worst of the summer, but a long way from the current state of the art.

All these years after Predator, these decades past the classic film, "Most Dangerous Game," that inspired this genre, it’s good to see the idea of the hunter becoming the hunted still gets the blood racing.

The movie's central gimmick isn't enough, and when more supernatural twists that don't play by the movie's own fantasy rules kick in, it lost me.

The Expendables feels, well -- disposable, a movie whose nostalgia isn't enough to make this 50. caliber trip down Memory Lane worth the fake napalm.

Its grisly violence and ridicule-religion tone make it sort of the anti-"Exorcism of Emily Rose."

The performers are given stock types to play, and Elba and Dillon, at least, can do a little with that.

There's an unexpected wistfulness, a bittersweet undercurrent to Going the Distance that could not have been in the script. This romantic comedy co-starring Drew Barrymore and longtime beau Justin Long was finished just as the real life couple was splitting up. For good, this time.

Devil is the sort of story Rod Serling would have taken for a spin in "The Twilight Zone," back in the day. Shyamalan came up with the idea, produced it and got others to script and direct this 76 minute exercise in movie minimalism.

A well-acted tale of an underdog's triumph that sorely lacks an underdog, it teeters between pleasantly generic film biography and rank manipulation.

Cute, bordering on cutesy, yes. Light and shallow and inconsequential in a lot of ways. But funny? Rarely.

A confident, cocky and often comic promenade down the same primrose path.

The script piles the preposterous on top of the absurd and the film's thin charms dissipate, revealing the creaking movie star contraption underneath.

While we may ogle Tamara, blush at her charms and revel in her world, in the end Tarama Drewe is just a bit of Brit tease that doesn't come off.

A musical vamp on young LA's decade-long Pussycat Dolls fascination with tarting up like strippers and shaking those money makers, it's somewhat less than the sum of its parts. But those parts. Oh my.

A barely serviceable romantic comedy.

The new creature feature Monsters is an intriguing mash-up of "District 9," "The Host" and assorted recent post-apocalypse road pictures.

But as useful as it is to chew on ideas that don't hew to climate change dogma, Cool It leaves big questions about Lomborg unanswered.

Too cute, too star-studded and entirely too long.

An unsatisfying if often surprising experience, a less warm and fuzzy "Parenthood."

Only Hopkins, readily referencing his bag of tricks, seems to get what to make of this "inspired by trues events (and a book by Matt Baglio)" hooey.

Manages to deliver a striking, nicely detailed, visceral thriller built on a corny, old-fashioned script.

The laughs - Doug tries to take up the pipe, a la Sherlock Holmes - are on the flat side.

3D or not, the film about the mop-topped Canadian - who turns 17 March 1 - doesn't let us get very close to "the talent."

It's a solid, engrossing thriller, but a slack one.

Fitfully amusing or not, the whole demented enterprise of Rango comes into question when you're that tone-deaf about what's appropriate for children.

It's a film of noble sacrifice and "good deaths" but surprisingly few chuckles.

It just takes a very long time to get going. Apparently seventh grade doesn't pack as much potential for amusing, scarred-for-life trauma as sixth grade.

It's meant to be faintly Pythonesque with a hint of bowdlerized "The Black Adder"...But it's entirely too slow of foot for that comparison to pay off.

Whatever romance and charm Gruen summoned forth from these rough and tumble show people living by their own laws in a traveling, self-contained world of poverty and cruelty, director Francis Lawrence has hacked and ground them off.

Take "Kick-Ass." Strip it of most of its wit and charm, amp up the violence, the sadism. Make it more crude and coarse and gory. And what you're left with is Super.

The script is a mad, muddled blitz of one-liners and movie references. Some of the animation is a hoot, and a few voice actors stand out.

Disney's Prom is to real high school what "High School Musical" was to "West Side Story" – all fluff, no edge.

Repetitious, tedious, and pretty much joyless.

Has a "been there, done that, jailed for it" feel.

A mild-mannered kids' comedy that makes for a pleasant-enough time killer.

Precious, protracted and pleasant enough.

Bad Teacher is a pulled punch, a pot-smoking/kid cussing/teacher copulating farce that is less than the sum of its parts.

It's a movie of thematic dead-ends. Director Azazel Jacobs and writer Patrick DeWitt give us a slow SLOW and somewhat morose tale that isn't remotely funny or profound enough to sustain that pace and tone.

James takes his comic lumps like a man. His Griffin suffers injuries and indignities and lets us laugh at him as he does. No matter where the script wanders and where the direction founders, at some point, James' comic instincts take over. And this time, they don't let him down.

Once you get past the cliched Spanglish dialogue and the sentimental tone of the early acts, A Better Life settles down into something both involving and moving.

The slapstick is very small-kid friendly and even the most adult-friendly jokes are pretty mild stuff.

The trouble with The Change-Up is that it doesn't change-up enough of the formula to render this new.

Take away much of the myth, most of the sorcery and all of the humor of the 1982 John Milius-Arnold Schwarzenegger version of the sword and sorcery epic "Conan the Barbarian" and you've got an idea what the new "Conan" is like.

This episodic romance works in fits and starts, and captures a bittersweet faux British turn by Anne Hathaway, plainly mismatched in being paired with real-life Brit Jim Sturgess.

Lacks surprises.

She (Parker) looks exhausted, first scene to last, and that fatigue spills off the screen onto us.

Abduction puts Lautner in motion and never goes very far wrong as long as he remains in motion.

Jackman gamely does his best, Levy keeps the kid just shy of insufferable and just this side of kid-appropriate in his behavior and language.

The movie never convinces us that Forster is convinced himself. The director lines up this bad good man in his sights, but he never quite has the nerve quite to pull the trigger.

This Paranormal doesn't tamper with the formula that worked in the first two films. It lacks the "money" moments that those films delivered and ends with a finale that is downright conventional. "Paranormal" reveals itself for what it has become, the "Saw" of found video thrillers.

Truth be told, J. Edgar drags, even when it pays homage to the widely discredited urban legend that the guy liked to dress in drag.

It's as disquieting as it is unsatisfying, a slog through gender issues, surgery and violence - sexual and otherwise.

A clever and adorable original film remade with most of the charm wrung out of it.

Daybreakers is a stylish but unavoidably silly sci-fi vampire thriller.

Overlong and entirely too ambitious in the number of “issues” it tries to cover, To Save a Life wanders all over the place before reaching its very predictable conclusions.

That Disney touch (which even Disney has trouble replicating) is missing. Even the hockey is unconvincing.

Bell, a petite, pretty blonde, may or may not have the Meg Ryan-Julia Roberts-Sandra Bullock goods. When in Rome, a leaden variation on that rom-com recipe, fails utterly to make her case.

Hallstrom and his low-heat stars can’t find the pulse of this corpse.

It’s an American "Love Actually" without the warmth that writer-director Richard Curtis stuffs into his all-star confections, without the wit, without much love, actually.

Cop Out is still funnier than the dreadful later Eddie Murphy cop pictures. But it feels like an homage to a period best forgotten.

The polished production sometimes touches and amuses despite its naïve “love conquers all” script.

Aniston doesn’t bring her old A-game to this. But at least she’s not quiet and reserved and no-energy, her approach to too many roles of late. Butler makes the most of his Neanderthal rut.

A crowded cast of some of the finest actors in the cinema act the hell out of a gimmicky, episodic, hit-or-miss script in Brooklyn’s Finest, Antoine Fuqua’s latest attempt to relive the glories of "Training Day."

A broad and formulaic culture-clash comedy built on fill-in-the-blank wedding comedy clichés.

This is not a bad cast, but whatever wit the script aims for is lost in the queasy details director Miguel Sapochnik found more fascinating.

Good looking (it was filmed in Winter Garden) but slow and bland, this faith-based tear-jerker is a depressingly unemotional affair, with writing and some of the acting so flat that even its emotionally loaded situations can’t inspire waterworks.

The characters in The Perfect Game speak old school “Hollywood Mexican.” In other words, they speak English with accents that we haven’t heard since the golden Age of Speedy Gonzalez.

On the sliding critter-comedy scale, Furry Vengeance falls somewhere between the Chipmunks and the Chihuahua (the one from Beverly Hills).

It's light in tone, feather-weight. But there aren't many laughs in it.

These guys set out to make a movie where they could crack each other up. At this late date, they can't even manage that.

A dull but harmless big-screen comedy aimed at the youngest movie goers.

There’s nobody delivering the laughs in this arid action comedy.

A generally joyless pastiche of sorcery history, imitation Potter "chosen one" Messianics and mirthless silliness, it's another in a string of recent black marks against Cage's Oscar-owning reputation.

Off the wall? Friend, you don’t know off the wall until you’ve seen five twelve-year-old girl singer-dancers cover the Tina Turner/Phil Spector epic “River Deep, Mountain High” in the screwball kiddie dance comedy, Standing Ovation.

Tedious time-killer of a kiddie comedy.

It's the same movie as the earlier "gotta dance" over-choreographed crunk-and-breakdance epics. Exactly the same.

It's not as scary as it needs to be or as clever as it thinks it is, but the new 3D version of "Piranha" is at least as gimmicky as those fabled 3D films of yore. With all the pointless 3D cartoons and joyless 3D ""Clash of the Titans" conversions, at last here's a picture that tosses its cookies, its coffee cups and its D-cups right in your lap.

The script, by actor turned writer John Posey, has structural problems and motivational issues in between the cliches. And Cena, a few movies into his career, is still all presence and no acting.

As with any movie, this kids' film is only as good as its writing - the jokes, the cute bits, the heart. And that's where Alpha and Omega comes up short.

Disney's effort to turn Kristen Bell into America's Sweetheart reaches its tipping point with You Again, a flat romantic comedy that packages her in a funny setup and surrounds her with funny people.

It's only a movie, and not a remotely effective one. And for Zellweger, whose "Miss Potter" and "Appaloosa" were barely seen, with "Leatherheads" and "New in Town" further deflating her A-list clout, that's the real shame here.

A mirthless, joyless comedy with nary a hint of romance, mystery or justification for its existence.

Those Jackasses from "Jackass" aren't getting better, they're getting older.

This Herefter, despite the odd engaging moment, is a terrible letdown, like investing in a belief system and discovering there's no "here" that you've been after all your life.

Director Michael W. Watkins, whose decades of TV credits go back to "Quantum Leap," manages one clever visual gag - a bus wreck, observed from the far side of a cornfield. We hear a crunch, see a telephone pole wobble and a little puff of smoke. Then Watkins blows the moment with a fiery overkill.

It's all tiresome, muddied and artlessly made.

A genre mash-up that never quite achieves "So very bad it's good" status.

Whatever brownie points Tillman scored with "Notorious", Faster is that wake-up call that he's no John Woo.

Paul Weitz ("Cirque du Freak," "American Dreamz") takes over as director, and the film shows all the signs of re-shoots and re-edits designed to bring in more characters and perhaps find a few more laughs.

The villains are weak and the narrative has little drive to it.

A little like modern country music - odd moments of sincerity, heart and authenticity peek through the plastic, the hype and the manufactured hokum.

A violent, clumsy, jokey, badly-plotted and miscast mess.

Somewhere is a triumph of tedium, banality passing for depth, a vacuous embrace of nothing.

It's a modestly effective but jaw-droppingly violent picture.

It's a rarely amusing movie overwhelmed by grating kids, unfunny sidekicks, half-hearted Sandler funny voices and a co-star who seems more fearful of smiling with each passing year.

A rude and seriously crude riff on taking a vacation from marriage.

This isn't satire, it isn't that funny and the only bits that work are the titillating ones.

A ten-years-too-late comedy.

Far more grim than "Grimm," and not nearly as much fun as it should have been.

The slapstick is mild-mannered, there's no romance, not a hint of emotion.

This Arthur is on the rocks long before Last Call.

It's a fitfully amusing, not remotely scary slasher picture.

It's not a bad looking movie, with Deco design touches that remind me of the earlier Rand film adaptation, "The Fountainhead." But the acting's flat and the script is absurdly cluttered with characters whose purpose may only truly become clear if they ever are allowed to make the other two films they have planned.

Thank heavens Krasinski, at least, had the screenwriter's ear. He makes every one-liner land. "The Hamptons are like a zombie movie directed by Ralph Lauren."

Hobo hits the screen as a grim, visually ugly, intermittently funny-occasionally preachy piece with only the estimable Mr. Hauer to recommend it.

A mad mash-up of sci-fi, Western, sacrilegious silliness and vampire movie. What lifts it to "I've seen worse" status is the previous teaming of star and director Scott Stewart, who last gave us the archangel fighting off other angels fiasco "Legion."

A screen romance that echoes its title. It gets by. Barely.

Well, Green Lantern isn't "Jonah Hex" bad. But it's silly enough to be part of the same "silliest Warner Brothers comic book summer movies of all time" conversation.

Glibly put, this challenging time-skipping rumination is the big screen equivalent of watching that "Tree" grow.

This script, this leaden direction ensures that even as the teen wish-fulfillment fantasy, complete with young women playing dress-up, Monte Carlo fails.

A slick one hour and 50 minute version of those political convention hagiographies ("A Man From Hope"), so it's not exactly an objective take on its subject, former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Despite the locations and the informative narrative, almost every scene is missing that spark that would bring the characters to life and immediacy to the story.

This isn't the worst of the bunch, not by far. But my premonition is this won't be the finale this series has screamed out for these past few years. This decapitation train never seems to reach its destination.

Nobody has much that's funny to say or cool to do. Even the spy gadgets are lame.

As straight exploitation, it's amusing, in fits and starts. It's just that Colombiana lacks the kinetic energy of "The Transporter" and the pathos of "La Femme Nikita."

The sex sequences are revealingly awkward - with their "Don't try this at home" message. But without characters we can invest in, this "Hangover Meets Zack & Miri Make a Porno" is just the "porno," and entirely too tame for that, too.

Whatever merits the production values have, the cheap frights don't deliver, the performers bring no pathos and the gimmick behind Apollo 18 flat out does not work.

An exploitation picture built on redneck cliches and big city liberal outrage, it's not all bad. But it is a pretty unpleasant wallow in the obvious.

"Evil" fails to triumph. Utterly.

The message delivered isn't subtle, with Kendrick delivering toss-away lines that suggest he doesn't even tolerate "the option" of divorce. But the bigger message might be that the Kendricks haven't sold out, "gone Hollywood" or watered down their Baptist beliefs based on efforts to reach an audience beyond the faithful.

Anna Faris and Chris Evans don't have enough scenes together, don't have enough funny lines and aren't surrounded by enough funny people to give this "Bridesmaids-lite" a shot.

So much is just so…obvious.

It's an infuriatingly static picture - actors walking around when they should be running, ruminating when they should be panicking, generally failing to convey fear and pick up the pace.

Give it points on setting and a couple of the performances, but the joke-starved All's Faire in Love only rarely rises to the level of fair to middling.

"English Reborn" isn't terrible and is certainly seriously harmless.

The Double is barely half the movie it had the potential of becoming.

It's all very messy and entirely too obvious at the same time. Montiel makes the most of his settings, but the story keeps staggering into dead ends.

The charm has aged right out of this silly stoner franchise.

Then there's Pacino, out-of-place and yet somehow right at home. You want big? Al does BIG. And since is as close as we're likely to get to "Don Corleone Does Don Quixote," that alone is worth the price of admission.

The film manages one grand "300″ moment, Cavill rallying troops for battle, doing his best Gerard Butler. But the lack of humor, the confusing, stumbling story and limited color palette blunt the film's 3D slo-mo shots of heads exploding and torsos torn asunder by the sword.

At long last, The Twilight Saga sinks utterly into camp with Breaking Dawn: Part 1.

Profane, profanely silly and blasphemous to beat the band, Legion begins well before plunging into the abyss of tedium.

Limp and lifeless, this Next Door neighbor should be evicted to DVD.

The film’s tone is all wrong, the pacing is dead and the veering between sex, sadness and sado-masochistic violence is enough to give you motion sickness. It’s a bad movie.

Survival of the Dead lacks the wit of "Zombieland," the polish and punch of last winter's "The Crazies," a remake of a Romero zombie picture from the '70s.

This colossal folly, the fiasco of the summer of 2010 - gives us all a ringside seat at the sight of Mr. "I See Dead People's" career gurgling down the drain.

If Kristen Stewart ever saw Vampires Suck, she'd be scarred for life.

It's a humorless movie of morphing zombies (they take on beastly attributes), phoned-in performances and trite dialogue.

This waking nightmare from the "Nightmare on Elm Street" creator is a puzzle with no solutions, a tale with a twist that isn't a twist at all.

Skyline plays like an effects guru's resume reel, not a movie.

Any signs of life the series showed in the last installment (Saw VI), a dash of humanity here and there, were premature.

The best you can say about this Yogi Bear is that he's harmless. No animal was harmed in the making of this picture except the one Hanna-Barbera made a bundle on almost 50 years ago.

The best you can say about this hooey is that at least he had the King of the Bs, Ron Perlman, along for a few sidekick laughs.

A timid thriller that manages a couple of mild jolts and a couple of creepy-cringe-worthy moments in its Variations on a "Single White Female" theme.

None of the current generation of wrestler-actors seem to have the charisma or comic gifts of a Hulk Hogan or Dwayne Johnson.

A humorless mashup of "White Chicks" and "Glee."

Sadly, Immigration Tango is like a slow-dance with your sister - perfunctory, awkward and without a hint of heat.

The eggshells the screenwriter and director walk on distance the story from the reality it aims to imitate. And that robs this tale of loss, grief and redemption of its punch.

The most epic miscalculation since the Golden Summer of M. Night Shyamalan. An unerotic unthrilling erotic thriller in the video game mold, Sucker Punch is "Last Airbender" with bustiers.

Its star, Brandon Routh, is just as miscast as a droll, world-weary "investigator of the undead" as he was as a boy-Man of Steel back in 2006.

The worst movie of the summer, arriving on the last weekend of the summer.

Lawyer-turned-screenwriter Dylan Schaffer's script is an unhappy combination of genres, tones, too many dead stretches of people in cars and inept dialogue. Rapaport's tiresome patter doesn't allow for the weak laughs to land.

It's an ugly movie to look at and a faintly nauseating one to sit through, truth be told.

The action is wan, the laughs hard to come by.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime fiasco, an epic fail like none we have seen this year, a bad idea by a very bad director and a career-crippling credit for all concerned. You don't want to miss it.

Whatever small pleasure there is to be found in this loud dud is due mostly to the residual good feelings from the first film.