Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

Based on the record-breaking bestselling series of children’s books, Harry Potter lives with his annoying family once more and is visited by a house elf called Dobby (voiced by Toby Jones) who warns Harry not to return to Hogwarts because of ensuing danger; Harry does not heed his warnings and returns once more to discover a dark force sabotaging the beloved members of the school’s faculty and freezing its victims to stone. Now Harry and Ronald must discover the source before it’s too late.

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Men in Black II (2002)

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This is such a fiercely and aggressively bad movie that I could have torn my eyebrows off my forehead to pass the time. It doesn’t help that this film is an hour and a half because watching this makes it feel like it’s two and a half hours long. It’s amazing how such a skilled actor like Will Smith has managed to build a career upon mediocre and sometimes awful summer blockbusters, yet he continues to rake in the dough movie-wise. “Men in Black 2” is a prime example of a terrible summer blockbuster that should have never been made.

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Ghost Ship (2002)

ghost_ship__2002There’s been many ghost films over the past decades, and there’s not much original material or horror devices you can inject within the horror genre these days. Especially films that involve ghosts and spirits because it’s all been done to death. This film is no exception applying to that formula, but it does tend to use the tired clichés with much tenacity that I found it hard to dislike this. No matter how hard I tried, it was tough trying to label it awful, because it isn’t awful. It’s far from being scary, but it’s not dull either.

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Life or Something Like It (2002)

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This movie isn’t as deep as it wanted to be, if it even wanted to be deep at all; it’s actually just pseudo-spiritual nonsense when you get right down to it. Angelina Jolie picks one of the rotten scripts out of the entire flock with a story that is nothing but fluff and unbearable melodrama. What should have been a meditation on a woman seeking self-analysis becomes nothing more than a comedy that tries every time to tells odd jokes but fails miserably.

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Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams (2002)

spykids2After a raid by armed soldiers during a party with the world’s top agents and their kids, Juni Cortez (Daryl Sabara), the youngest of the Cortez spy family is accused of stealing the high powered super weapon The Transmooker Device. Now Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni Cortez must travel to the island of lost dreams and face off against monsters, soldiers, and rival agents Girti (Emily Osment) and Gary Giggles and find the real transmooker device before the evil Donnagon (Mike Judge) gets a hold of it and prove Juni’s innocence. But their parents and meddlesome grandparents are on the hunt for the kids before they’re killed. I tend to easily grow tired of family movies if they’re either too hokey or corny; most of the time, they’re both.

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Below (2002)

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“Below” has the potential to become a truly incredible and claustrophobic horror flick, but never follows through with one genre focus. Despite being inaccurately profiled as an underwater monster flick, this is not. This is a horror film that has a story and uses it throughout the film most of the time. We get the sense that Twohy wants to push this movie to the limits but eases up in the last minutes and tends to resort to old horror clichés like the complete silence and trash that falls out of a closet, scaring the audience, and the inevitable fright pop-up of a character with a sharp booming soundtrack in the background. Director David Twohy takes this cast of characters and stores them in this small submarine letting them fend for themselves.

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Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)

atlantisMichael J. Fox voices the character of Milo Thatch, an archaeologist who in his field is considered to be eccentric by his colleagues. Milo believes that the lost city of Atlantis is under water and he wants to retrieve the Shepard’s Journal, a book that proves to be a map to finding Atlantis. No one wants to provide the funding for his proposed expedition, until one night he’s taken to an eccentric old millionaire who wants to help him. He gives Milo the Shepard’s journal and tells him that his grandfather once wanted to explore Atlantis. So, Milo is then taken to a shipyard where he meets a team of explorers who are going along with him. All seems well, but after a while, Milo begins to suspect they have ulterior motives.

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