Bad Company: Movie, DVD Review (2002)

Directed by Joel Schumacher, ritten by Jason Richman and Michael Browning, 111 minutes, rated PG-13.

(Originally published 2002)

Another week, another nuclear weapon, another dirty Hollywood bomb. Ka-fizzle.

This time out the film in question isn’t “The Sum of All Fears” but Joel Schumacher’s “Bad Company,” an appropriately titled comedic thriller that doesn’t star Ben Affleck as the hotshot on which our national safety and security hinges but, alas, on the comedian Chris Rock.

Allow me to wipe that tear from your eye.

Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and written by Jason Richman and Michael Browning, “Bad Company” is a mismatched buddy movie that asks audiences to suspend disbelief to such an absurd degree, they might hang themselves trying.

Originally set to hit theaters just weeks after Sept. 11, “Bad Company” was swiftly shelved and its release date pushed back until June 7, which just happens to be the very week the official clean-up ended on what was once the World Trade Center Towers.

No, Disney’s Touchstone Pictures can’t get a break with this film--and, considering their movie is all about mining laughs from a plot to blow up Manhattan, they don’t deserve one.

In the film, Anthony Hopkins is Oakes, a gum-snapping, toothpick-chewing CIA agent eager to prevent a Yugoslav terrorist named Dragan (Matthew Marsh) from purchasing a nuclear weapon from a Russian Mafiosi named Adrik Vas (Peter Stormare).

His key man in the operation was Kevin Pope (Rock), a refined agent posing as an antiques dealer who’s life is snuffed early in the film. For Oakes, tracking down Kevin’s twin brother, Jake Hayes (Rock), to complete the deal, isn’t the problem. Instead, the problem rests in getting him to do the job competently--which, ironically, can also be said for director Schumacher.

Paired with Bruckheimer (“Pearl Harbor,” “The Rock,” “Armageddon”), for whom subtlety and character development are clearly as important as plausibility, Schumacher delivers a film that’s peppered with jump-cuts, explosions, car chases and some pseudowitty banter between Rock and Hopkins--all of which might have been fine had the film only backed its action with a story that wasn’t riddled with holes and with a sense of excitement that was reasonably fresh.

Schumacher does neither, but he does prove the rule--you really are as bad as the company you keep.

Grade: D