Savage Critics
I just love it when critics savage a movie. Here's a running list of my faves.
Oh, my God, this movie sucks.
...when Ghost Rider gets fully fired up, his look doesn't so much say "hell's envoy" as "Duraflame" or maybe "sterno from my tenth grade French Club fondue night."
If you think George Tenet's Central Intelligence Agency was a disaster, wait until you see Robert De Niro's torpid, ineffectual movie about the history of the agency, "The Good Shepherd."
Without an ounce of ingenuity but plenty of moralizing, "Home of the Brave" repackages Patricia Foulkrod's "The Ground Truth" -- a piercing documentary about vets' struggles to reintegrate into society once home from Iraq -- into a laughably clichéd, melodramatic, Oscar-courting prestige pic.
You cannot believe how excruciatingly awful this movie is. It is bad in a way that will cause unfortunate viewers to huddle in the lobby afterward, hugging in small groups, consoling one another with the knowledge that it's over, it's over -- thank God, it's over.
An against-all-odds fairy tale of the hoariest kind, "Goal! The Dream Begins" runs through sports movie clichés with all the subtlety, style, and originality of a kick to the shins.
Things go bump in the night in this 19th-century ghost story, but it's the bump of emptying seats, as audiences flee in boredom, that will haunt you for days.
In "RV," the downwardly spiraling career trajectories of Robin Williams and director Barry Sonnenfeld intertwine like the ropes of a tangled parachute, and all the helpless viewer can do is look on aghast as the whole abortive fiasco plummets toward Earth.
This is a movie aimed squarely at the set that find "boogers" so amusing: the five- to 12-year-olds. Anyone older who's considering this as a night's possible entertainment, be forewarned: To watch this idiocy is to feel your brain cells die.
...as an action movie "V for Vendetta" is a dud -- far too long at nearly two and a half hours, with flat, grungy visuals, choppy editing and no sense of urgency. But as a political work, it's something else -- heavy-handed, reactionary and flat-out stupid.
There are few words to describe the awfulness of this movie, but let's give it the old college try: dismal, depressing, embarrassing and utterly lacking in any artistic or social worth.
Every holiday season, the studios leave a big lump of shit in moviegoer stockings. Last season, we had "Surviving Christmas." This season, it's "Just Friends."
As "Dukes" drags to a close, you might ask yourself how many car chases you can watch before your eyes glaze over. At one point, the film's narrator says, "If you have to go to the bathroom, now would be the wrong time." I beg to differ. There is no wrong time to flush this turd.
A vacuous, insulting romantic comedy, toothless would-be Hollywood satire, pretzel of pointless postmodern wackiness, and soulless TV adaptation all rolled up into one style-free, harshly lit mess, "Bewitched" lurches in four directions simultaneously and just ends up falling on its face.
The yahoos behind this Adam Sandlerized "updating" take the 1974 Burt Reynolds original about an imprisoned, point-shaving ex-quarterback and burn it in a sacrifice to the gods of high-volume ineptitude.
To call "A Lot like Love" dead in the water is an insult to water.
The reasons to avoid David Duchovny's unwatchable coming-of-age drama can best be summarized in a simple declarative sentence. Robin Williams plays a retarded janitor.
A pile of blood-soaked toxic waste dumped onto the screen in an attempt to salvage Bruce Willis's fading career as an action hero.
At one point, Diesel literally wades into a rancid sewer and emerges covered in feces, an image that sadly doubles as a metaphor for his career.
The movie seesaws between crude comedy and sudsy melodrama, and it's hard to decide which aspect is more ineptly handled. Plenty of mad moviegoers will put this in their diaries as one of the worst pictures in ages.
Saying Uwe Boll's "Alone in the Dark" is better than his 2003 American debut "House of the Dead"--possibly the worst horror film of the past decade--is akin to praising syphilis for not being HIV.
The best thing you can say about "Elektra," a lifeless spinoff of the failed Marvel Comics "Daredevil" movie franchise starring Jennifer Garner, is that Ben Affleck is mercifully absent this time around.
In whipping up this mess, director Jay Roach has borrowed the strategy of his Austin Powers sequels: shamelessly recycle everything people remember from the first film, crank up the gross-out factor and smug self-satisfaction, and hope all the mercenary whoring doesn't turn potential viewers off so much that they refuse to shell out their hard-earned money.
...a moth-eaten stranded-in-the-desert yarn that throws in every cheap trick in the manual to pump up your heartbeat, is so manipulative that the involuntary jolts of adrenaline it produces make you feel like a fool.
...the movie's pitiful victims will find themselves out the price of a movie ticket and nearly two hours of their lives that they will never get back.
If your girlfriend tries to drag you to see this, we suggest sawing off your legs as a proper countermeasure.
If Hans Blix is still searching for bombs, he should check out Surviving Christmas, a crass, shrill and laughless disaster of a holiday comedy with a desperately mugging Ben Affleck that should be banned under the Geneva Convention.
To dismiss Voice as a tedious after-school special unintentionally insults such riveting features as "Stoned" with Scott Baio and "The Pinballs" with Kristy McNichol.
If you like tennis, you'll definitely like Wimbledon the tennis tournament. But you'll need to love tennis, chick flicks, and covering your eyes and ears to like Wimbledon the tennis movie.
Silver City may be the mustiest political-conspiracy tale ever filmed; it's like Chinatown rewritten by Ralph Nader.
"What the fuck do we know?!," the film asks. Just enough, it suggests, to begin to fathom how little we understand. But viewers' willingness to follow that rambling train of thought will depend heavily on their tolerance for painful earnestness, New Age hooey, and fuzzy mysticism.
There are so many greedy Americans fleeing giant snakes in this flick that it's hard to keep them straight. One thing's for sure, though -- they don't die fast enough.
Without a Paddle: The year's most ingenious title. It speaks volumes about the creek we're headed up before the film even starts.
There is some truth in advertising, at least when it comes to the Alien vs. Predator tagline: "Whoever wins...we all lose." Yep. That about sums it up.
Danny Deckchair is not a film that begins promisingly and falls apart. It's patently awful from the opening scene...
...its grating characters and shaky grasp of filmcraft make it tempting to root for the sharks to finally put the film's leads out of their waterlogged misery.
When a Spike Lee film doesn't fly, it sinks like a stone. This one is Gibraltar.
Nothing captures the essence of summer-blockbuster desperation quite like a billboard featuring an Oscar-winning actress on all fours.
Remarkably ridiculous without having to go lowbrow (believe us, we know lowbrow when we see it), Anchorman is the silliest thing to happen to news since Fox.