Agility is the prime trait of Tarzan, but Legend has little of it. The film strains to juggle the character’s baggage instead of embracing the tale’s innate silliness and spirit of adventure (over the years Tarzan has fought dinosaurs and Roman gladiators).

While the first Horrible Bosses tried to tap into the widely held fantasy of killing the overloads of the office, its sequel mines the farce in being your own boss. The entrepreneurial efforts of the film’s ever-yammering trio, of course, fail, and the film descends into a thinly sketched kidnapping plot that serves mainly to space its celebrity cameos.

Transcendence ultimately hinges on the relationship of Caster and Evelyn. The excellent Hall, looking a bit confused by what she’s gotten herself into, does her best to emotionally ground Pfister’s increasingly unfocused and heavy-handed story.

So while ‘The Winter Soldier’ succeeds as finely engineered merchandise built to be crowd-pleasing entertainment, for moviegoers and shareholder alike, it has a shelf life that won’t last much past its running time.

Judging the Muppets against their own high standards is perhaps unfair, particularly when we’ve been absent of Henson’s genius for nearly 25 years. Muppets Most Wanted may not rise to the irreverent slapstick the gang once did, but it is still, after all, the Muppets.

Made clearly to capitalize on the popularity of 300, Rise of an Empire is something like collected behind-the-scenes from the Persian invasion featured in 300. Whereas the first film chronicled, ab by ab, the Spartans’ heroic stand in the Battle of Thermopylae against Xerxes’s Persian invasion, Rise of an Empire is about the concurrent naval fight, the Battle of Artemisium.

It feels like it’s only a third act, lacking any buildup of tension or character development. When Stokes solemnly argues early in the film about risking life for the recovery of what he calls “the foundation of modern society,” the movie has presented its thesis statement, and settled any debate. Though deadly encounters follow, the nobility of the quest is unchallenged.

Good news for fans, it’s better than the original!

Oldboy doesn’t bear much of Lee’s characteristics, though it can be entertaining, in a remake study kind of way, to see how he contorts an already much-contorted story into his own film. Much of the dialogue is stilted (several scenes are laughable) and the melodrama feels unmoored without the lurid, baroque atmosphere of Park’s film — which, after all, was kind of the whole point. Lee feels lost here, too aware that Oldboy isn’t really his movie.

Ardent fans (who should stay through the credits) will likely be satiated by the pleasing enough Thor: The Dark World. But perhaps at this point, even diehards may wish for something more from a Marvel equation that often subtracts humanity.