Director Adam Shankman pushes together scenes with little rhythm or flow. Writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant ignore credibility, throw in pointless sight gags, treat humiliation as comedy and use tiresome ethnic stereotypes. In short, Diesel doesn't get the help he needs.

Meant to explore anger, all this picture does is manufacture it.

The results are so listless, dated and characterless.

A bunch of scenes in need of a tighter narrative and, more importantly, a raison d'être.

Add them up and the sum has a certain mathematical inevitability: Really annoying characters, really annoying movie.

Herbie without the herb has never been my cup of tea.

While this may all sound seductively warped to those who enjoy movies featuring sexually deviant confinement and torture, blasphemous rants and rampaging rednecks, The Devil's Rejects does not live up to its sick, twisted and campy intentions. "Straw Dogs" meets "Smokey And The Bandit" for the new millennium it ain't.

In lieu of a movie, we get a series of car chases rudely interrupted by the occasional smattering of dialogue.

In the worst scenes in Deuce Bigalow: European Bigalow, it's as if Schneider and Co. are straining to invent new taboos just so they can break them, a strategy that provokes more confused silence than laughter.

The director's approach is far too ham-fisted and erratic to bring Four Brothers up to the level of enjoyable trash -- it's too crummy to earn that distinction.

Instead, you get a nominal character study that boasts a single mighty performance and one nifty scene; alas, both performance and scene exist in a narrative vacuum - the plot is non-existent and the pace makes the ice age seem hasty.

Falls somewhere on that aesthetic scale between mediocre and flat-out bad.

Scott means for his entertainment package to be hip, hysterical fun. But his stylistic embellishments and indiscriminate appetite for sensation crowds his title character right out of the film.

Most of The Fog will seem drearily perfunctory even to those viewers who don't know Carpenter's version, which itself emulated the elegant gloom of Val Lewton's horror pics of the 1940s.

Unwilling to offend, the scribes have committed the greatest offence of all - they've neglected to tell a story, airbrushing out anything remotely dramatic.

It's difficult to say who is more misguided here: the men (director, screenwriter and producer) who made the movie, or the women who signed on to play the parts.

One of those purposefully glum studies in alienation that Hollywood occasionally produces as blue-state specials for disenchanted liberals.

The result is a curious mix - a picture that simultaneously seems meanderingly loose, affording the cast plenty of performing space, and suffocatingly tight, choking off the audience from any interpretive engagement.

Forgettable.

None of this is funny enough to justify stealing 90 minutes of your viewing time.

An Adam Sandler movie without Adam Sandler, it turns out, is not necessarily an improvement.

By then, the lofty ambitions can't disguise the sad reality - it's long, it's cluttered, and it's trite.

With some movies, though, it's just the opposite. Like this one. It's a whole lot easier to forget than to forgive.

Guaranteed neither to offend nor delight.

What's amazing is how far McConaughey carries this nonsense despite his total lack of chemistry with Parker and almost Zen-like indifference to his circumstances.

This story, like many of Towne's own, does not come with a happy ending. Or beginning, for that matter, because it's almost immediately clear that Ask the Dust bites the dust -- his dream movie is stillborn.

Here's a movie that tries to be a video game but is less entertaining than a vending machine.

Basic Instinct 2 is double trouble -- the femme is to die for, the film is to die from.