In Young Adult, Charlize Theron plays an ugly knockout. Her Mavis Gary isn’t a babe hiding behind glasses or bad makeup a la Monster. She’s a 37-year-old writer who still wears Hello, Kitty! clothes and says things like “Gross.” She was voted Best Hair in high school, a time of her life she idealizes, when she thinks she was “at her best.” In reality, though, “at her best”  meant behavior such as making fun of a crippled student and calling him a “theater fag.”

But Mavis was also going out with Buddy (Patrick Wilson) during those halcyon years, and they had sex and mixtapes and special songs. So she’s not happy when an email pops into her inbox with a pic of Buddy’s newborn, a product of his happy marriage to someone who is not Mavis. They’re meant to be together, Mavis believes. I’m going to go get him, she decides. So Mavis, able to live the spontaneous, nomadic life of an author of a failing young-adult series, packs up her laptop and leaves Minneapolis for her podunk hometown to win Buddy back.

Young Adult is directed by Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) and penned by Diablo Cody (Juno), the latter of which may be cinematic Kryptonite to viewers who rolled their eyes at Juno MacGuff’s what-the-fuck verbosity. (Reitman also directed that film.) There’s not a “home skillet” to be found, however; in fact, the script’s underwritten. Cody does at least demonstrate a more reasonable grasp of how teens talk, feeding the appropriate lines not only into Mavis’ stunted mouth but also those of the girls on whom the writer eavesdrops for book material.

But whereas the dialogue is smooth, the story is lacking. Girl-chases-boy may be a variation on a classic, but here it’s not enough. Mavis meets with Buddy a handful of times after she returns home, dolling herself up and having her hopes raised by his every nice word. Afterward, she turns to Matt (Patton Oswald), the aforementioned handicapped guy whom she runs into her first night back and decides to make her confidante/drinking buddy. (Mavis drinks a lot.) Soon, we start to feel like the best friend who’s too polite to tell a torch-carrier to shut the hell up. And so does the spinelessly nice (and likely torch-carrier himself) Matt: “You need to move on!” he finally blurts after one too many brain-bleeding it-was-so-great! recaps.

And that’s about all there is to the story — Mavis fantasizing, Mavis with Buddy, Mavis with Matt. It’s a short stretched to feature-length. Theron is what keeps the film from being a total yawner; it’s fascinating how she makes the character’s bitterness manifest itself in bedraggledness, even when she still looks, well, like Theron does. (Near-constant sweats and a slouch help, but the actress is still gorgeous.) There’s a slice of lesson-learning here, which is hinted at throughout the film but more pointedly served at the end, when Mavis is bemoaning her fate to Matt’s sister (Collette Wolfe), who’s dazzled at the big-city writer. “Everyone wishes that they could be like you,” she tells a hungover Mavis. It seems to give her new resolve, but when Mavis gets back to Minneapolis, she still wears sweats.

Viewers might want to try this on eyes, ears

The riots begin early in Battle in Seattle, and not 20 minutes into Stuart Townsend’s portrayal of the 1999 World Trade Organization protests, there’s a doomsday exchange between the city’s police chief and its freaked-out mayor: “There’s only one option left!” the cop tells Jim Tobin (Ray Liotta), who recognized the activists’ right to assemble and had forbidden the use of violence against them. So it’s time to get dirty, but after demonstrations, chaos, and greenlit use of force, where could the narrative possibly go for another 80 minutes?

Back to more of the same, essentially. For anyone who wasn’t paying attention nine years ago, Seattle had been scheduled to host the first WTO conference on American soil. Peaceful and apparently ridiculously well-organized protesters set out to shut it down, and they did—but only after five days of allegedly unprovoked police brutality and hundreds of arrests that turned the downtown area into “Beirut,” as the governor (Tzi Ma) puts it.

Townsend, an actor better known for being Charlize Theron’s boyfriend than for his roles in films such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, has created an unremarkable and often dull writing and directorial debut. His docudrama approach, which weaves real footage into his fictional story, was a good idea, and the war-zone bedlam of clashing masses comes across.

The lead anarchists, however, are less than gripping. Martin Henderson, a nonpresence in films such as The Ring and Torque, is equally uncharismatic here as Jay, an activist whose vengeance is personal. Lou (Michelle Rodriquez, playing, surprise, a tough girl) joins Jay’s group and serves as a forced love interest. And André Benjamin is Django, a save-the-turtles guy who’s meant to add levity but is mostly annoying, particularly when he tries to rouse a bus of arrestees by singing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” On the other side of the conflict are—irony alert!—known activist Woody Harrelson and Theron, playing a riot cop and his pregnant wife, as well as Connie Nielsen, the token hottie reporter with a heart.

The cast spans the spectrum of acting talent, but even the best can’t make Townsend’s awkward dialogue sound good (especially Liotta, whose increasing panic is hilarious). Worse, there’s no mistaking whose side Townsend is on: The film begins and ends with WTO history lessons, with plenty of sermonizing about humanity versus money in between. The camerawork, too, underscores scenes of injustice, in one case cutting to worked-over protesters after the line, “Look around you!” just in case the audience fell asleep. Whoops, almost did.

It’s so much cuter when a kid calls you an asshole.

John Hancock, the character, is supposed to blow as a superhero. He drinks, he curses, he spends his days sleeping on benches or wreaking more havoc on his home base of Los Angeles than he does sparing it when the city’s in distress. Unfortunately, the creators of Hancock, the movie, didn’t think beyond these broad strokes of superjackassery, which means that their antihero merely spreads his suckage filmwide.

Or for the majority of it, at least. Until a surprise turn approximately two-thirds into the movie, Hancock feels as if it were crafted by folks who found The Transformers too high-minded. (For the record, that would be The Kingdom director Peter Berg and writers Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan.) Will Smith glowers impressively as the perpetually hungover title character, but even though it’s a side of the charismatic actor we’ve never really seen before, there’s a reason.

Hancock’s signature moves include chugging a bottle of whiskey, jetting straight up into the sky (with terrible CG when he’s in midair), and yelling at anyone who boos his efforts. (Though, to be fair, it is funny-cuz-it’s-true when he saves a car from being crushed by a train and then says, “All you people blocking the intersection. You’re all idiots.”) His favorite threat is that he’s going to stick one person’s head up another one’s ass. It’s mildly amusing until he actually does it –  in a scene accompanied by the Sanford and Son theme. (Can’t put my finger on it, but something about that feels kinda racist, no?) Hope you also like the word “asshole,” too, because the scripters obviously do, thinking it the most hilarious burn imaginable and having characters of all ages throw it around liberally.

The gist of the story involves Ray (Jason Bateman), the public relations guru Hancock saved from the train, who intends to rehabilitate the superhero’s image. When it’s discovered that Hancock’s a wanted man, Ray suggests he turn himself in, become a model prisoner, and return to society in a properly heroic style, complete with lame uniform and good manners. Of course, Hancock doesn’t go for it – until he does. And people start loving him again, and we find out a bit about his origin, which involves amnesia and immortality.

It’s all yawn-inducing until the world discovers that Hancock isn’t necessarily the last of his kind, as he believes. At this point, the action kicks up, the story gets interesting, and the insipidity in general drops enough to save you from further brain-numbing. It’s not nearly sufficient to compensate for the mess that came before it. But odds are good that a couple of summers from now, you’ll get the chance to be bored stupid by this tedious character again.