Pimenthal's script consists of the scantiest storyline, framed around a succession of strained Farrelly Brothers-style gags that feel as though they were peeled off the floor of the editing room for "There's Something About Mary."

Critic-proof, devoid of plot or acting, and quick to mock anyone who might make something of it.

The laughs just keep rolling as 'Weird Al' makes a movie. Overheard from a still-convulsing woman after a recent screening of Weird Al Yankovic's UHF: "I'm sorry, but that's funny." I'm sorry, but she's right. Yuks you feel obliged to apologize for are yuks nonetheless. And UHF prompts a lot of apologies.

The movie feels like something parents want their kids to see. Harold and Kumar wouldn't want anything to do with Beth Cooper or Denis Cooverman. You're probably not going to like them much either.

A perfunctory gore fest and quite possibly the year's worst date movie.

The plot feels both familiar and far-fetched.

There are people who find treasures in celebrities' garbage cans so it's a reasonable gamble they might want to buy tickets to watch their throwaway home-movie projects as well.

The Santa Clause 3 is a colourful jumble. (But quite a bit better than Jungle 2 Jungle). Nevertheless, whether parent or elf, You might laugh when you watch it in spite of yourself.

After 90 minutes of diligently searching the premises of ACB2, no evidence of mass entertainment can be found. Recommend cancellation of all future similar missions.

The mould for all these stories of hot lust and burning cities, creamy-skinned rich girls and their bitter lovers is that grand and grotesque cinema monument, was "Gone With the Wind." You can't go there again and you shouldn't want to.

Land of the Lost is one of those films so caught up in its concept it has forgotten its audience.

Watching inept American actors and wishing they were badly dubbed into Japanese isn't any fun at all.

The contrived script is stretched to the breaking point by Reiner's listless direction.

The Viral Factor is deliriously far-fetched. And one wishes director Dante Lam (The Beast Stalker) could have at least had some giddy fun smashing all his toys around. But his new film is tediously overwrought and drably made, with scenes punctuated by synthesized drums out of eighties American TV drama.

A funereally unfunny comedy.

While the punishments and triumphs are absolute, the entertainment value is highly equivocal. This ultimately relegates Untraceable to the ranks of so-so thrillers with legitimate but half-developed intellectual aspirations. And since you inspired the movie in the first place, part of the responsibility rests on, well, you.

It is, from beginning to end, a paint-by-numbers movie. There's a mildly entertaining climax, but most of Showtime is a layering of tired pop-culture tropes by actors who are not especially interested in what they're doing.

The obvious question about Repo Men: Why bother?

A film willing to cheat whatever way necessary to scare you... The good news is that once you leave the theatre, you'll never think of Boogeyman again.

The movie has a sharper and more acerbic screenplay than you normally find in bargain-basement, D-list teen comedies.

Max Payne, game or movie, has precious little to say.

Given Waller's experience and budget, one might expect he could upgrade the B-movie acting and stock situations. He doesn't. The pay-off comes not in the story or acting, but the camera play and movement.

Whether madcap parody – the "American Psycho" of G-man flicks – or walk on the wild side of Lynch's obsessions, the film's a failure.

Forgettable.

The filmmakers have also advertised that their new movie eliminates the "Pow! Right in the kisser!" threats of spousal abuse that permeated the original series. The question of audience abuse has yet to be addressed.

The problem lies with Williamson's script, which feels as if it has been torn from different places and glued back together like a ransom note.

The only surprise here is the real star of the show, who turns out to be not Halle Berry, not even Bruce Willis, but a flat computer screen in all its hard-driven glory.

By comparison to this effort, "Pineapple Express" seems like a model of thoughtful maturity.

Gosh, what to say about House of 1000 Corpses? That it's about 999 too many, for starters. Then again, in a picture where the body count is the whole point and the only purpose, carping about the math rather misses the mark.

This Means War is a Valentine's date dud: Think wilted roses, squashed chocolates and flat champagne.

Will be construed by the faithful as an embarrassment of riches and by the rest of us as cruel and unusual punishment.

The filmmakers have altered the premise from the unlikely to the ridiculous.

This isn't a movie so much as a marketing strategy -- a moving poster loosely disguised as a motion picture.

5 Days of War feels low-budget in everything except its battle sequences.

In an era when the words "President" and "penis" can occupy the same sentence and prompt nothing but yawns, this picture actually manages to surprise, to startle, yes, to administer a series of small but genuine shocks.

[Walken's] every minute on screen is filled with that level of jittery invention, and, watching him at play, not even the flintiest temper could resist a wide grin. Envy can surely be a trial, but Saint Christopher is there to ease our troubled journey and see us smilingly home.

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

This is an excellent movie for watching Jolie, one of the more entertaining sidelines in recent Hollywood movie going. There are two firsts for her here: Angelina does blonde and, more importantly, Angelina does comedy.

A dull, formulaic romance comedy with an ulterior motive and a sly message. Remarkably, the message is this: "Please Re-elect George Bush."

A lamentably slack and dishonest genre exercise.

Entertaining and well done. Without losing its comic rhythm for a moment, it is also a withering spoof of black victimism and the corrupting effect of racial solidarity on the American legal system.

Fails as a comedy-drama because it’s neither funny nor involving. But it fails as a buddy movie because Willis and Morgan make for a dull couple.

I doubt that Lawrence is conscious of this process. Nevertheless, stuck in a dull commercial feature, a very good actor happens upon a new solution to an age-old problem: She improves the script by transcending it, and steals the picture by abandoning it.

It's kind of fun but the twists and turns are all too familiar.

This briefly inspired bit of surreality quickly descends into gratuitous bondage, mayhem and dumb humour, marking the usual progression from mildly absurd premise to gratingly idiotic conclusion.

Damned if Parker hasn't done it again. An intermittently good filmmaker but a consistently bad polemicist, he may well sway opinion here -- but, oops, not in the hoped-for direction.

A lightweight flick about a heavy-duty subject, A Dark Truth plays like a TV movie back in the days when TV wasn't worth watching.

Though The Cave really, really tries to be scary from as many directions as possible, it fails to hold much in reserve and never manages to build suspense.

Instead of playing the role in drag, the erstwhile Madea simply is a drag.

Adolescent boys will savour My Way's bombast and solemnity. Cringing adult audiences will more likely beat a retreat before final call.

What a shame that The Spirit isn't nearly as good as it looks.

Few things are more painful to watch than a botched comedy.

General Boredom meets Major Tedium on the Civil War fields of Virginia.

The concept is high but everything else is merely fair to middling, one more or less watchable B-movie in megabucks clothing.

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.

Though Silent Hill's shoddy dialogue and incoherent story constantly irritate, several sights and scenes possess a certain surreal grandeur...Sadly, that's not enough to compensate for Silent Hill's utter lack of tension, intrigue, character development or satisfactory explanations for what the hell's happening on the screen.

When Queen of the Damned knows it's ridiculous, it's moderately entertaining fun; when it tries to be serious, it's truly ridiculous.

But Keaton is a mistake. He's an actor with an innate sense of irony firmly grounded in the here and now. Even as Batman, skepticism was his forte; true belief falls way outside his range.

The devil is back in Exorcist: The Beginning, and he is more disgusting than ever. Not more scary, just really yucky, in a kind of maggots-on-a-pizza-slice way.

Hey, it’s all good clean fun.

Aside from uninspired movie-parody gags, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore suffers from gadget overload.

Like a tone-deaf singer at a benefit concert, John Q. is a bad movie appearing on behalf of a good cause.

Adam is back to lining his pockets again.

I think the guy who exited the advance screening after less than 15 minutes said it best. "This movie's garbage," he hollered, as the audience members tittered and shuffled their feet, which they continued to do throughout this humourless, hackneyed yawnfest.

Somewhere, back in the mists of time, co-writers Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber must have flapped their gums in the fond hope of crafting a script; today, that whisper of hot air has swollen into a feature flick that rains down upon us a veritable torrent of inane plot.

Sitcom star Harris puts his smart-aleck chops to good use as Patrick Winslow.

A layabout movie -- not risibly bad, just relentlessly sub-par.

Rarely does a film so graceless and devoid of merit as this one come along.

It's a comic-book idea that might have been fun. But it's beyond the reach of first-time feature director Kevin Donovan, who squanders his main asset, Jackie Chan, and fumbles the vital action sequences.

Unfortunately, nobody had the good sense to call the comedy authorities and shut this Zookeeper down.

Once Bullock's character clears her head at the top of the thrill ride, Premonition becomes inescapably dull because it is her mental health, not her purposefully dull husband's fate, that interested us.

For the price of a ticket, and 100 minutes of your time, how many laughs are enough to qualify as just compensation? Will four or five do? Let's be generous and count five.

If laughs are the currency of any comedy, then this one pays minimum wage and, worse, makes you work damn hard even for that pittance.

As for the locals, they speak like extras from "Fargo," although, on this go-round, that weird Swedish accent has somehow lost its power to amuse.

The trouble with Undiscovered isn't that it's actively annoying but it's so dramatically listless it seems determined to become Unremembered.

It's unclear whether any of the actors here have promising political careers since their only purposes are to serve as prey, adversaries and involuntary incubators to their guests.

With his heavy features and grimacing shyness, Dante provides the best entertainment in Swimfan.

The manner in which the writer, Richard Matheson, and Jeannot Szwarc, in his glory days the director of Jaws II, conspire to tell the story should not only render the audience tearless, but speechless as well. [11 Oct 1980, p.E7]

Pathfinder is aimed more at the action-figure crowd than the history buffs.

Characters already too wicked to be credible start doing stuff simply too stupid to be believed, with no help from a cast way too overmatched to be useful.

Fool's Gold starts flat and then deflates because of torpid pacing and flailing performances.

With its stilted dialogue, fragments of voice-over and over-busy camera, Red Riding Hood feels off-kilter from the start.

It’s just such a shining example of a dull studio comedy.

Just my luck that I saw the trailer for the film several times and already knew all of this, which made the long-form version of the movie redundant.

It's the sort of visual joke you would wince at in a 1940s movie; to see it nowadays, you're tempted to dismiss it as unintentional.

It's doubtful that today's children would have any patience for the stagy 1956 version, so the current animated offering, despite its flaws, at least opens a door to the music.

A crashing bore.

A two- hour-plus surrealistic bummer - it makes the audience feel as if it is coming down from a virulent drug. (The pacing, the images, the music and the endemic menace recall clinical descriptions of cocaine-induced paranoia.)...A disgusting, misanthropic movie.

The movie is, however, generous in its condescension: Given enough tolerance, cash and a good sex manual, it says, even the mentally handicapped can be just as middle-class and cute as you or me.

Pretty much what you'd expect -- just another haunted house that happens to float.

Writer/director Gus Van Sant, who's built his reputation on the romantic decadence of "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho," completely misses the poetry and the irony of the book. [20 May 1994]

The movie is so relentlessly self-congratulatory, you can't help becoming thoroughly sick of it.

Plays out like a 1950s B-movie with a fat special-effects budget. Brain-numbing dialogue, incoherent action and glaring improbabilities aside, it's a bearable combination of sci-fi paranoia and historical fantasy that drags modern viewers, and the robotic hero of "The Fast and the Furious" movies, Paul Walker, back to the centre of the Hundred Years War.

One of the most preposterous efforts by any major director in recent memory.

In the end, a few genuinely funny moments aside, the script is simply too predictable and unvarying to earn the viewer's loyalty.

Campy costumes can't disguise the incoherent plot, confused performances and lame script that send this star vehicle spiralling downward.

Valuable life lessons always come at a steep price, and this one is no exception. Sorry, but you'll have to shell out for The Divide and then suffer through its nearly two hours of bloody inanities. Weigh the balance, make your choice.

Handsomely mounted, emotionally involving sci-fi movies don't often show up in the darkened galaxies of our theatre chains. So Alvart's English-language debut is definitely a film you want to catch on the big screen. Just don't sit too close, lest you end up with a dose of pandorum.

It's not a winner and not quite a loser either. Like many a beauty contestant, it's glib instead of serious, stylish instead of substantial. Miss Universe, it could never be. Homecoming queen, maybe.

The young couple is far less compelling, which is one reason why the remake is only intermittently effective. Bland and dim-witted, it's hard to see why they'd attract Ryder's wrath.

After the first hour or so of strained puns and wisecracks, you start feeling that the sooner the ending comes, the happier it will be.

The pretty good stuff comes early, when Nic and Ron, weary of wasting women and children, suffer an attack of conscience and desert the Crusades.

Veers between crude and cloying.

Far more than most action stars getting on in years, Bruce Willis has aged nicely into the role. Maybe it’s that shaved pate of his, a bullet-head that still looks primed for any chamber.

Isn't exactly what you'd call fresh. But although it borrows ingredients from many familiar Christmas flicks, it's got a sly twinkle of its own.

There's a lesson behind Gentlemen Broncos , the new film from director Jared Hess: Don't try to mock above your talent level.

But for a lightweight summer romantic comedy, The Perfect Man delivers the goods and includes a couple of scenes that are, surprisingly, fresh and quite funny, both of which, incidentally, involve the music of Styx.

Delgo is blocky and hastily coloured in. Characters are stiff; there is little variety in movement. It's a cheapo product ideally suited for a Saturday-morning pyjama vigil in front of a small screen. And the film suffers from a poverty of imagination to boot.

Neither boring enough to qualify as pornography nor vital enough to generate a controversy.

The movie features Eddie Murphy as a vampire who is both cool and sucks. The same evaluation might apply to the entire film, which is neither as good as it might be nor as bad as you might expect. The long- in-the-tooth Dracula story, which has been updated and set in the black community of contemporary Brooklyn, is a pulpy mishmash of horror and comedy, equal parts the product of its comedian star and its creepshow director, Wes Craven. [1 Nov 1995, p.C2]

Uh oh, pull over, I think I'm gonna be carsick.

But the best, most irrefutable reason why Sex and the City 2 deserves one-half a shining star. It’s worse than Sex and the City 1, and that alone is a remarkable achievement.

If you are expecting a pleasant evening of escapism, you will be cruelly fooled. The editor responsible for the trailer is clearly a genius.

Marks the emergence of a talented young actress. Not Britney -- who has the amateur's tendency to stand looking awkward after delivering her lines -- but Manning (Crazy/Beautiful), who plays Mimi with the gusto of a young Holly Hunter. Though she has little competition here, when she's on the screen she pretty much owns it.

You might believe that a movie comedy requires no visual rhythm, and that entire scenes -- especially those big set-pieces -- benefit greatly from a shooting style devoid of imagination and unremittingly flat. If so, A Guy Thing is surely your thing. Enjoy.

[Pitof's] managed to create an entire digitalized city that has all the allure of an underground parking garage. And his action, it's cluttered; his editing, it's confused. The result: blandness butchered, hamburger chopped, kitty littered.

A 0-star Comedy that is nonetheless guaranteed to rake in multimillions.

Chan's comedic gifts and still-nimble moves are wasted in a string of unimaginative household calamities and practical jokes.

For all its current political incorrectness, the original film at least attacked hypocrisy; this one practises it.

Though the script takes pains to paint George as a passive boy-man, there's just not enough lovable here and too much of the thoughtless lout. Butler beware: In acting as in soccer, if you keep taking dives, sooner or later you pay the penalty.

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.

It makes "Little Man," "Scary Movie 3" and "Beerfest" look like comic masterpieces.

Very little of it works.

Tedious, baffling and ultimately laughable.

The product of a first-time director and writers who have no sense of scene structure or shape, or even a discernible sense of humour.

Norbit is pretty much a bad-taste sinkhole.

View from the Top never gets off the bottom -- comedies don't come much flatter.

Both actors seem too callow and shallow to actually feel all those emotional raptures they are supposedly experiencing. This is a problem exacerbated by the talent of the supporting cast.

As for Keitel, he pops up in a brief cameo as a housing contractor, with a dump-truck full of sand, the one that De Niro is standing right behind. The pair engage in a heated argument, as they once did so memorably those many years ago, and then the truck dumps that load exactly where you know it must. An esteemed actor gets buried but, what-the-fock, the franchise laughs on.

It's always rather sad to watch gifted performers stranded in a tepid thriller. You can see them, as professional pretenders, trying to believe that they're creating a character, but the lie is transparent -- all they're really doing is advancing a retarded plot.

Little Man will probably satisfy fans of the Wayans.

A 105-minute cringe-a-thon that reduces the Katharine Hepburn of her generation to a sitcom harpy presiding over a brood of Valley Girl chicks.

For a comedy about the quest for inner peace, A Thousand Words reeks of desperation.

The storyline is a sinkhole that swallows up any sense and suspense.

The whole mess turns nuttier by the second. A black comedy, you ask? I wish. There are plenty of laughs here, but nary a one is intentional.

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

Tideland is the easiest of Gilliam's films to follow, yet the most disturbing to watch.

A family-friendly adventure.

Shamelessly cross-promotional "extreme" sports flick.

Just when you thought this movie had run out of bad ideas, this last-minute outpouring of sanctimony feels like a whole new way of being slimed. Some movies come with parental warnings; this one feels as though it should come with a mandatory biohazard suit.

For about 20 minutes, Phantoms, based on Dean Koontz's bestseller, keeps you guessing. After that, it barely keeps you awake.

If the external threat in the plot were a little more credible, this would be an annoying distraction. But in the context of the rest of Gloria, it's a safe strategy: When not watching Sharon Stone act, audiences can fall back on just watching Sharon Stone.

Reportedly, the movie began life as a short film, and if it actually ran for 22 minutes with a few commercial breaks, like a good sitcom should, Filth and Wisdom could be bearable. At 84 minutes, the movie feels both overpadded and underdeveloped.

So intent are the Strausses on showing off their visual chops, they leave the film's story, dialogue and acting in shambles.

An underdog's breakfast of a movie, with some quite funny characters and set pieces mixed with some excruciating "moral lessons," but at least it moves along at a brisk pace.

Director Marshall ( Pretty Woman) has created a comic drama so confused in tone, the actors often seem to be acting in different movies.

Forget about "Saw," "Hostel" and all the other films in the new, notorious torture-porn genre. If you're looking for a really sick movie, check out License to Wed.

Patch Adams is a flawed visionary, but surely he deserves better than this crass and manipulative movie.

At the end of The Comebacks, Coach is offered job with a college basketball team called The Sequels - a joke perhaps, but all too horrifying a prospect after watching this dull fumble.

The film's putrid sexism is subverted in a series of sharp and funny scenes that at least raise Sorority Boys to the level of "American Pie."

A Cinderella Story has little of the smarts that distinguished this spring's big teen hit, "Mean Girls", which starred Duff's arch-rival, Lindsay Lohan. Whereas that film presented a genuinely complex and enjoyably snarky portrait of modern teen life, this effort is content to be another candy-coloured fantasy.

In the case of When in Rome, oh to do what the Romans used to do: Toss the bloody thing to the lions.

A few early laughs scattered around a plot as thin as it is repetitious. There's talent in this picture, both before and behind the camera, but virtually none of it gets on the screen.

This time the action takes us out of the usual campgrounds and girls in underwear into the realm of outer space, where no one can hear you screaming "Enough already."

Dragonfly has more plot than a figure-skating competition, and just about as much credibility.

Wilder's created world is alive with his erudition, his sympathy for his characters in their loneliness and flawed goodness. This film doesn't do him justice but it's a gesture in the right direction.

Yes, it's all quite mad, Max, with a shaggy-dog ending to boot. But this giddiness, its go-for-broke/what-the-hellness, also is the film's strength.

Taylor Lautner puts the abs in Abduction, but not much else.

When a movie ostensibly on a serious subject is so God-awful silly, is it impossible to be offended, or impossible not to be?

If physical appearance creates its own class system (in high school and beyond), then Qualls is perfect for this proselytizing role. He has that rarest of movie-star faces -- one that over comes the tyranny of beauty.

The tedious, tortuous storyline and lifeless cast are two larger problems.

Doesn't work because it isn't much of a ride. The action scenes are strictly by rote. The incidental characters are all incidental.

The obvious problem with The Whole Ten Yards is that it begins with the wrong kidnapping. Instead of taking Oz's wife, the criminals should have grabbed the authors of the original movie.

As cinematic flops go, nothing falls quite as hard as a failed black comedy.

Piranha 3DD is overcrowded and pointlessly mean. The stunt casting of David Hasselhoff playing himself, riffing off his infamous 2007 drunken home video, gets in the way of the storyline.

Consequently, as star vehicles go, Ford Fairlane runs straight over the very guy it's meant to transport. Some will see that as the movie's greatest fault, others as its only virtue. Take your pick, and come out swinging. [13 Jul 1990, p.C1]

The movie pretty much blows.

Give this call a miss.

A lurid thriller that marks a new career low for both director Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields, The Mission) and co-screenwriter Larry Cohen (Phone Booth, It's Alive).

Here's a truly novel sports film: It actually has a script, decent acting, sympathetic characters. And it's fun.

Is Kazaam racist? In effect, yes. But it'sracism linked to bad marketing: You can't really mix a black-pride rap film with a revamped version of "Free Willie" and expect them to magically jibe.

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

The Love Guru is a comedy like the Leafs are a hockey team.

The Boondock Saints II does, from time to time, display a vulgar charm. Or maybe it just wears you out.

Like the recent Adam Sandler dud "Jack and Jill," a sizable chunk of Chip-Wrecked was shot on the newest ship in the fleet of a major cruise company – the ultimate in movie product placement!

The slapdash dialogue and smug vocal talent -- even the presence of the much-loved host of "The Daily Show" is wearying -- detract from the visual appeal of the most energetic sequences (like a raucous train chase) and what's left of Danot's designs.

The first 48 HRS. was similiarly nasty and violent, and it too was emptier than the inside of an efficient bell jar, but it was funny. Eight years later, director Walter Hill can find nothing to laugh about - the violence in this appalling picture is played out in a mirthlessly misanthropic vacuum. [8 Jun 1990, p.C1]

The paradox here is that the message of respect for animal life is outweighed by the lack of respect for human beings.

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.

A noxious PG comedy starring Adam Sandler as a pair of middle-aged male-female twins that should have been separated at birth to spare us from this movie.

Here's the title: Couples Retreat. And here's the review: Couples, Retreat. Yep, just find the verb, treat it as a command, and vamoose, unless you harbour an abiding curiosity about how eternally long 100 minutes can feel.

The movie is sentimental and reliant on bodily-function humour, but it also has a generous spirit, a multicultural rainbow of characters, and a social message about approaching fatherhood responsibly.

A formula flick. And the formula is not 51 times more entertaining than usual. Maybe 1.5, at best.

It is hard to say what is more despicable about The Condemned: the overtly racist portrayal of Brekel-Goldman as Jewish-media bloodsuckers, or the film's sleazeball attempt to pass off lovingly attentive sequences of ritual torture - often scenes of incredible hulks bashing cowering women - as a critique of media violence.

God forgive me, but I worship the Bad Dialogue Fairy -- he gets me through these endless nights.

And De Bont's effects are wildly over the top, devoid of the stylish cuts and intriguing angles that enriched the original. In fact, there's so little panache in his destructive action that it begins to seem like a weird act of self-destruction.

Both syrupy and scatological, this is a typical family-dividing Sandler comedy: Parents will hate it but the kids will delight in its rudeness.

A shoot-'em-up for cynical times. Its only asset is Seagal himself, and frankly, he's is getting a bit past it.

A painfully contrived romantic comedy/thriller that may (or may not) have brought Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston together as a real-life couple.

This one is a big, big disappointment. [27 July 1987]

Without Spielberg's technical pizazz, and with a gummy mixture of homage and spoof, Congo chokes on its own tongue in cheek.

Jawbreaker breaks ground in one way. The movie is notably unpleasant, not just because it's morally offensive, but because it strives for this arch, artificial John Waters tone without any accompanying pay-off in wit.

Lazy, perfunctory and free of tension, the new version will satisfy neither the admirers of the original nor anyone looking for a gory respite from seasonal good cheer.

New Year's Eve. It's big and shiny and crowded and no matter how much you might look forward to it, it never lives up to the hype. The movie is even worse.

What Boll gives us is a boring beating over the head.

Ho, ho, horrible.

Listlessly directed by Julie Anne Robinson (Miley Cyrus's The Last Song) from a script written by a trio of writers (Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray and Liz Brixius), One for the Money is tepidly glib throughout.

The film can't be accused of taking itself seriously. Shot in 3-D, with lots of choppy action, a rudimentary plot, and plenty of CGI-shape-shifting, it comes in at a brisk, disposable 88 minutes.

A lazy, hasty effort that offers little beyond a few jack-in-the-box startles and a high body count, including Hewitt's bouncing about in a shirt half-unbuttoned over a bikini top.

So here’s an idea: Maybe filmmakers should shoot what Ashton’s up to off-camera, because not many laughs are making it to the screen.

Dopey.

It's outstandingly obnoxious.

While not as edgy or funny as "The Mask," the popular 1994 "original" starring Jim Carrey, the movie offers eye-popping animation high-jinks and a warm-and-fuzzy story that reinforces what some would call family values.

The story is a much more serious problem, a run-on, overstuffed narrative that feels like a very long prologue for a climax that never comes.

Never one to shrink from the challenge of parodying the already parodic, along comes Marlon Wayans to do in A Haunted House what he once did in "Scary Movie." And do it much, much worse.

A semi-intriguing abomination, the movie The Cat in the Hat takes a piece of classic childhood Americana and turns it into something garish, dumb, ugly and senseless.

Frankly, about 20 minutes into this dud, I was rooting for the alien beasties -- their diagnosis seemed dead-on.

Grade Underclassman an "Unacceptable effort," and "D" for derivative.