An example of a movie review. negative.

A: Okay, let me start off by saying that nothing in this will come as a surprise to anyone who's read the other comments. That being said, MY G-D, THIS MOVIE REEKED! I mean, WOW, I didn't know it was possible to throw as much money as they obviously did at something and still come out worse than ANY Roger Corman movie! Corman was probably pitched this movie at some point but declined due to the poor quality of the script! The only reason this movie got made in the first place is that someone said, 'Hey, Zombies are popular. Video games are popular. What game can we get a hold of that has zombies in it? Resident Evil? No, someone else got there first. Silent Hill? No, too silent. People will never sit in a dark room just to be scared silly. Hey, didn't Sega have a game where people ran around shooting zombies? They're out of the platform biz, we could get that for pennies!'

Basically they tried their best to make a movie that felt like the video game, even down to shooting the combat as if the characters were actually playing the game.

The first and major problem is that the original game was horrid. I mean,

bad-movie-merchandising-made-into-a-worse-game-in-two-weeks-and-then-shippe d-out-and-bought-by-morons-and-their-parents-for-christmas horrid. The graphics were boring. The monsters were boring. The levels were boring. The interface was boring. The CASE was boring. In other words, this was a boring game. And that was the ARCADE version. The home version was even worse! With the home version, you didn't even get the shotgun to hold in your hand while you were being bored silly by this pointless game! But I digress.

The second problem is that they went so far as to actually intercut scenes from actual gameplay during the fight scenes. HUH??? Didn't the editor have enough confidence in the effects to indicate that there was an actual fight going on? Not to mention that EVERY fight was shot from the perspective of a video game, which may explain the tedious use of Matrix-style effects. The problem with this is that the game was a first-person shooter (the player proceeds from the POV of the character). Maybe that's why they put in the game graphics, to let you know that they were alluding to the game... Right, whatever...

Anyway, the only thing that made this ENTIRE experience remotely enjoyable was the fact that everyone in the theatre was making fun of the movie out loud, so my sudden fits of hysterical laughter and general incredulity were taken as commonplace and didn't get me kicked out.

To sum up, DON'T GO SEE THIS MOVIE! Don't even deign to rent it when it comes out on video in a couple of week. Run. Just run.

An example of a movie review. negative.

A: This film can be judged from three viewpoints: as history, as a profile of Amin, as a fictional thriller.

It fails as history, it mentions in passing the coup that threw out Obote, the expulsion of the Asians, and has the Entebbe hi-jack as background, but not in any chronologically consistent time frame.

As a profile of Amin it may have been interesting, because Forest Whitaker is incredibly good, and if this was a better film, he would get an Oscar. (He got it - which proves the Oscar voters don't watch the films they vote on.) It ignores relevant historical episodes in the novel, which observed Amin and the history of Uganda from the point of view of the doctor. It tells instead the fictitious story of the Scots doctor and his impossible love life from the point of view of Amin. But the story told is the one incident that Amin was probably innocent of.

As a fictional thriller, there is no plot to hold it together. The beginning is taut - it takes cinematic liberties with the novel, but sets up the story. The character of the doctor is well-defined, but becomes lost in the second half of the film which suffers as a result.

Why the doctor decides to stay in Kampala is badly explained - seduced by power? Why he befriends no-one is strange. The character of the friend in the novel has been lost because the Scotsman has the affair instead of the black doctor - a ludicrous entanglement which does not seem even faintly believable, but allows the writers of the film to show the ferocity of Amin close at hand. The Man called Horse bit at the end is risible.

Finally in 1971, Uganda drove on the left, not right, the number plates were three letters and two or three numbers - and where are the Equator tusks?!

In short - if you've never heard of Amin, you may want to spend two hours watching this film to appreciate Forest Whitaker's acting, but the last hour will bore you to confusion. If you know Uganda or have read the book - don't see the film - it will only depress you. And if you want to know why the doctor was so foolhardy - he wasn't.

An example of a movie review. negative.

A:
Sorry, gave it a 1, which is the rating I give to movies on which I walk out or fall asleep. In this case I fell asleep 10 minutes from the end, really, really bored and not caring at all about what happened next.