The Pledge (2001)

The trouble with director Sean Penn's mostly-gripping The Pledge, about a cop who promises a grieving mother to find the killer of her child, is not Jack Nicholson's gnarlier-than-usual detective (compare him with the clean-cut Foyle-like turns of It Happened In Broad Daylight's Heinz Rührmann and Cold Light of Day's Richard E Grant) nor the story's movement from the Swiss Alps to Nevada, but Penn's muddling Dürrenmatt's screenplay - a jaunty mystery with a detective-novel ending - with the author's later book, "The Pledge - Requiem for the Detective Novel, which refashions that screenplay's plot into a much darker existential drama; Penn borrows scenes from the earlier 1958 adaptation and incorporates aspects of the screenplay (such as a sequence that demystifies the serial killer), and so detracts from the book's grim philosophy.

★★★☆☆

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The Core (2003)

When Earth's electromagnetic forces start misbehaving, unleashing a barrage of stock-footage world-landmark destruction, a crew of scientists, geologists and astronauts is assembled to drive a worm-like burrowing craft to the centre of the Earth to "restart the Earth's core", and boy do they have their work cut out for them: no, not saving the Earth but trying to make look interesting their repetitive chair-shaking encounters with, "Oh my god, diamonds the size of Cape Cod" (chair shake, chair shake) and "Oh my god, giant empty geodes" (chair shake, chair shake) and "Oh my god, hull-breaching lava" (chair shake, chair shake) etc, etc.

★★☆☆☆

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No Reservations (2007)

If you stir through this watery soup, you can occasionally glimpse the ingredients director Scott Hicks was playing with in the kitchen and see what his dish was supposed to be (an emotionally-stunted chef discovers love when she takes in an orphaned niece and meets a man) but the movie is served up in such a limp fashion and with so little energy, it takes on the flavour of a reprimand levelled at a successful career woman who, even though she is able to run the kitchen of a popular New York restaurant and takes in an orphaned niece without hestitation and is polite, calm and friendly with neighbours and colleagues, is nonetheless treated like a mental case, called a loon, and ushered off to therapy sessions with a psychologist because she isn't devastated at not having an Aaron Eckard with Point Break tresses in her life.

★☆☆☆☆

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Olympus Has Fallen (2013)

The US President is held hostage in a White House overtaken by North Korean terrorists and only John McClane -- I mean, only Gerard Butler's Mike Banning -- can save the day, in this oh-so-lame Die Hard ripoff that steals entire scenes but lacks the humour, charisma, sense, and suspense of the action movie classic.

★☆☆☆☆

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