But it presented a tepid version of "Romeo and Juliet" with settings so minimal as to look skeletal.

Negative reviews were also present, Alternative Press criticized the album, writing that it "plays out like a tepid, second-rate version of Iowa, which pretty much makes it a third-rate anything else."

Subtlety is the hallmark of Ms. Dijkstra's work, but the "Park Portraits" register more like bland, tepid versions of the "Beach Portraits" than stirring additions to her oeuvre.

The film was a product of careful times in depicting race relations in Hollywood, but the director Alfred E. Green offered a tepid version of an astonishing story that begs to be remade.

- and may seem a rather tepid version of the shellacked spikes of yore or even the "faux-hawk" that has been a hipster fave of late.

Even in tepid versions, Mr. McCartney's songs are brilliantly made.

Whoopee... let's bring dullard politics into this and blame the Americans for once again sucking the life out of European culture and selling us a tepid version, at great profit.

The original 1924 lobby has been gutted and replaced by a tepid contemporary version, and the grand stone entryway has been painted over - with several shades of paint.

In both the United States and Britain, where there was once a coherent (albeit often unpopular) alternative to conservatism, there is now merely a tepid version of the same, with added self-righteousness.

Wally and his friends perform a tepid version of The Twist at Wally's party in "The Party Spoiler".