I'm tempted to call Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain a clever film for dumb people. It operates under the guiding principle that if you put ironic air quotes around everything, you are immune from all criticism. The characters can be vile, the violence gratuitous, the film can be casually misogynistic and anti-Semitic, but hey, that’s okay because it’s all just a joke, people. Lighten up.

The film begins to insulate itself right out the gate by saying, “This is based on a true story . . . unfortunately.” (I laughed.)

It’s Miami in the 1980s. Our “hero” is Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), a body builder and personal trainer who believes that his own physical perfection is merely his first step toward the American dream. One of his clients is a self-made millionaire named Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), a greedy and grasping little man with a giant Star of David dangling from his hairy chest (for reals). Lugo gets the idea to kidnap Kershaw and get him to sign away his fortune. He recruits two body building cohorts: Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), a former cokehead just out of prison, now a guileless born-again Christian; and Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), a gym rat who’s been made impotent...

It’s really rather stunning to me that there hasn’t been a biopic of Jackie Robinson since 1950’s earnest The Jackie Robinson Story that starred the barrier-breaking baseball player as himself.

Spike Lee, reportedly, pursued the subject for many years, but never got the funding.

That’s a shame, because Lee would’ve definitely made a better film— one with more grit, depth, and ambiguity. But he couldn’t have made a more crowd-pleasing one. 42 tells an important story—a story that needs to be shared with a new generation—in a slick, highly entertaining way. As directed by Brian Helgeland, it’s a nifty piece of old-fashioned American mythmaking.

Robinson, just in case you didn’t know, was the first baseball player to crossover from the Negro League to the majors, at a time when Jim Crow was the law of the land in the south. (His jersey number, now retired in all of baseball, was 42.) He played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and he was great—more importantly, he was tough and virtually unflappable. All the taunts and abuse just made him a better ballplayer.

Newcomer Chadwick Boseman plays Robinson with a pleasingly cocksure physical presence (he couldn’t talk back to racist...

I am about to write the most depressing sentence you will read all day: Tina Fey and Paul Rudd have no chemistry together.

I know, right?

I mean, everyone loves Tina Fey and everyone loves Paul Rudd so the idea of putting them together just seemed like a no-brainer, a match made in rom-com heaven. But there are zero sparks. Zero. Every time they kissed, I was actively puzzled: Why are the nice friends kissing each other?

Their lack of chemistry, though, is a rather apt analogy for this bump-on-a-log of a film. It’s a dud—tonally confused, narratively moribund, painfully unfunny, unsuccessful in almost every respect.

Fey plays Portia Nathan, a by-the-book admissions counselor for Princeton. Her life is thrown into a tailspin when her boyfriend (Michael Sheen) dumps her and she goes on an admissions trip to a small alternative high school that resembles no school on earth (it’s on a farm, and seems to have about 13 students and one teacher). That teacher, John (Rudd), is eager to introduce her to one particular student, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), who wants to go to Princeton. In one of the film’s many far-fetched contrivances, John is convinced that Jeremiah is the son that Portia gave up...

It’s not fair—and possibly not even professional—for me to judge a film by its trailer, but that’s exactly what I did for The Incredible Burt Wonderstone.

I gazed upon Steve Carell and Steve Buscemi, as a Vegas magic act, with their bad fake tans, and skin-tight Lycra get-ups and horrible flowing wigs and I made the following mental equation: The producers of this film think that these things are funny, therefore my sense of humor does not align with the producers of this film.

And, well, damned if I wasn’t right.

Here’s the thing: Siegfried and Roy style Vegas acts, if they still even exist, stopped being ripe for satire 30 years ago. There was a brief period where America genuinely luxuriated in this kind of cheesiness and then, well, the 80s happened, and we all became conversant in irony. But The Incredible Burt Wonderstone acts as if the mere spectacle of a shirt unbuttoned down to the naval (and chains around the neck! hi-larious!) is still something worth mocking.

The plot, in brief: Longtime friends Burt Wonderstone (Carell) and Anton Marvelton (Buscemi) have being performing as a duo in Vegas for years. But audiences are dwindling, turning to Steve...