Cradle 2 The Grave: Critic Reviews

You realize just how forthrightly rote and businesslike Cradle is. And you don't mind. Because business, it turns out, is good.

The cinematographer- turned-director likes his MTV-style editing so much that in his drive for hyperkinetic overkill he sacrifices coherence to wallow in barely contained chaos.

If you're a mortgage-paying grown-up, it seems like an eternity since most of the studio's output stopped being 4-U.

A secondhand action movie that retreads all the tired staples of the 1980s and '90s.

It's saying something when Tom Arnold's performance is among the movie's highlights.

This is a ride, a video game, a soundtrack -- unapologetic and clearly labeled as such. It has no middle speed.

[DMX] acts like he raps -- in fits and starts, with heaps of ruff growling. Li barely has enough lines to qualify for a SAG card.

The film is filled with astonishing set pieces that violate the laws of nature but are exciting, nonetheless.

It throws in enough calculated accouterments to honestly earn the label of 'product.'

Sure to please slackjaws who are not tired to death of this kind of material recycled again and again and again.

Bad movies kill you incrementally, but Cradle 2 to Grave is so egregiously slipshod, so flamboyantly awful, that it might get the whole job done in one sitting.

In Cradle 2 the Grave, producer Joel Silver returns with gusto to the mix of martial arts action and urban attitude that proved so potent in Romeo Must Die.

Would be a perfectly decent B-action movie if it weren't shipwrecked in the last act by laughably ridiculous plotting and a lazily executed climax.

It's as idiotic as a committee of bad screenwriters could make it.

Cradle 2 The Grave is 2 ridiculous 2 B believed. And that's perfectly okay.

The movie positively kicks aspirations.

If all this leaves viewers more drained than exhilarated, that's the nature of this particular beast.

The few promising skirmishes that do erupt sputter out quickly as if fight choreographer Corey Yuen had dropped his cell connection while phoning in his moves.

A mess. Don't try to make it make sense.

When the film features a steel cage brawl between Li and a gaggle of Ultimate Fighting Champions, an ATV chase with DMX, and a kick-ass girlfight between Kelly Hu and Gabrielle Union, enduring the dreck is a relatively small price to pay.