There is not a single inspired moment in all of Joel Schumacher's Bad Company. There is not a single eye-popping visual, a truly hilarious joke, or a moment of real chemistry between any of the actors. None of it is particularly bad--it's pulled off with the kind of slick, slam-bang Hollywood competence we have come to expect from our summer movies, but even for a Jerry Bruckheimer production, it is woefully rote. The problem with the movie is not that it's bad. It's just thoroughly and maddeningly okay from start to finish.

As a comedic thriller, the movie generates laughs by tossing a streetwise character into the high-stakes world of international espionage and black-market nuclear bombs. Chris Rock stars as Jake Hayes, a fast-talking smooth operator who appears to be on indefinite hold in his life, making quick bucks by playing speed chess in the park and scalping tickets. You know he has a good heart because he's deeply in love with Julie (Kerry Washington), an open-faced nursing aid who's thinking about moving on in her life and leaving Jake behind.

What Jake doesn't know is that he has a twin brother from whom he was separated at birth. The brother, Kevin Pope, a deep-undercover CIA operative, is killed while on a mission to buy a suitcase-size thermonuclear device from a Russian arms dealer (Peter Stormare) before any terrorists can get their hands on it. Pope's partner, Gaylord Oakes (Anthony Hopkins), a seasoned and preternaturally in-command veteran, recruits Jake to stand in for his dead brother (actually, to stand in for his dead brother's alias, an antiquities dealer with connections named Michael Turner) to finish the operation. The deal is not easy, though, as a Yugoslavian terrorist also has his sights on the bomb and keeps trying to kill Rock's character to keep him from getting it first.

This is a promising set-up, and the comic possibilities of Hopkins and Rock working together are tempting. Yet, the movie is so hurried, so fundamentally rushed in every conceivable way, that nothing ever gels. The screenplay, credited to Jason Richman and Michael Browning from a story by Gary Goodman and David Himmelstein, is a generally weak piece of work, obviously relying on Rock to carry much of the weight with one-liners and unexpected zingers. At one point, he delivers a comic diatribe against Hopkins' CIA superior that is close to hilarious, but it's not enough to buoy the rest of the movie's lack of imagination and energy. There is also a comical subplot involving Rock having to convince his brother's returning ex-girlfriend, a hottie CNN reporter (Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon), that he is not an impostor. It works well for a while, but then it goes on too long and ends so suddenly and abruptly that you feel like something significant was left on the cutting-room floor.

Stylish director Joel Schumacher (Batman & Robin, Tigerland) actually shows a modicum of visual restraint, although he and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski (Dark City) shoot Bad Company with the by-now-expected blue tints of the modern action-thriller, making everything look as good as possible without being able to disguise that we've seen it all before. We get car chases, and more car chases, and shoot-outs, and more shoot-outs, most of which are choreographed in a hectic, sloppy style that makes it hard to determine who's where. This is particularly true of the final shoot-out, which takes place in the aesthetically unpleasing confines of a dark room filled with lost luggage and culminates with the ol' standby of having to defuse a bomb with less than a minute to go (there are also a few other complications, including Julie's being held hostage).

Again, it's not that Bad Company doesn't work, it's just that it doesn't work very well. It seems old and creaky, a well-worn concept that doesn't benefit much the infusion of new blood. It's certainly watchable, but it's also immediately forgettable.

Copyright © 2002 James Kendrick