This means to land somewhere between a kiddie flick and a PG-13 action extravaganza, yet I don’t remember similar efforts from my youth – say, Raiders of the Lost Ark – being quite so bland. A monotone Nicolas Cage plays an adventurer whose family has been hunting an ancient treasure for generations. Only the series

Paul Walker’s attempt to toughen up, like Ashton Kutcher’s in The Butterfly Effect, feels the need to include child pornography as a plot point. Even without that stomach-churning element, Running Scared – in which Walker’s low-level mobster spends one night trying to recover an incriminating gun – operates as an abhorrent exercise in child endangerment.

It took until July, but the summer of 2003’s first big-budget bomb finally arrived. This comic-book adaptation, about an assortment of legendary figures from adventure stories and Gothic novels who join forces to stop world war, is largely incoherent when it isn’t supremely silly. Presiding over all is Sean Connery as Allan Quatermain, looking slightly

As an adaptation of the point-and-shoot video game of the same name, Doom is more honest than most action films. While the nihilism of the on-screen deaths in such movies is usually vicarious for the viewer, Doom puts the carnage right in our hands. Not that the filmmakers intend to implicate the audience in any

Owen Wilson is a comic actor as odd and quirky as his dented nose, but Behind Enemy Lines smooths him out into a generic action figure. He plays a Navy pilot who’s shot down over Bosnia, and even his clever ad libs are drowned out by the roar of jet engines. This is one of

The Transporter features little more than a guy, some fast cars, a lot of guns and a girl. But it knows what to do with them. Jason Statham, as the underground courier of the title, brings a calm but lethal concentration to the ensuing action scenes. “Some fancy driving,” a police inspector observes at one

Action maestro John Woo (Face/Off) plays director-for-hire with this run-of-the-mill Hollywood take on a Philip K. Dick story. The movie is about having your memory erased – Ben Affleck plays a corporate shark who loses three years of his life – and Woo fans will want to add it to the list of forgettable efforts