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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
waste of time, film and money (spoilers), June 9, 2002
Because he gets to play the part of identical twins, Chris Rock is given the opportunity - rare for a lead player - of having his character die in the opening scene. Considering the quality of the film as a whole, he might well regret that BOTH characters don't get to bite the dust early on.But stuck in the film he is - and he, co-star Anthony Hopkins, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Joel Schumacher are going to have to live with the stain of this embarrassment on their records for a very long time to come (hence, the appropriately named "Bad Company"). The screenplay by James Richman and Michael Browning tells the tedious tale of one Jack Hayes, a ne'er-do-well New York City shyster, who is employed by the CIA to impersonate the twin brother he never knew he had, a brother who was recently killed in action trying to retrieve a portable nuclear bomb from some Middle Eastern terrorists. Anthony Hopkins plays Gaylord Oakes, a seasoned CIA operative whose job it is to "groom" Hayes for the mission. It would be hard to overestimate just how mediocre this production really is. The storyline is flat and unimaginative, the villains bland and colorless, the humor weak and poorly executed, the action scenes routine and strangely truncated. The "grooming" sequences are particularly unimpressive, since Hayes seems like essentially the same person after the lessons as he was before them (think of it as James Bond meets "My Fair Lady"). About the only news here is that Schumacher seems, for the most part, to have abandoned his Cuisinart-style approach to directing and editing, choosing instead to shoot and splice the film in a basically humdrum, static way. The result is a talky film in which no one says anything that is of even the slightest interest either to each other or to the audience stuck watching the spectacle. Apparently, the action film genre has become so depleted of ideas that the best filmmakers can do at this point is to concoct a fantasy scenario in which a wisecracking Average Joe gets to save the world from total nuclear destruction in time to say "I do" to that longsuffering girl waiting patiently back home. This sort of preposterous premise may work well in "Austin Powers"-like parodies, but it hardly merits serious attention in a straight action-adventure tale such as this one. And frankly, I am beginning to question the appropriateness of using the threat of nuclear annihilation by terrorists as a source for mindless mass audience entertainment. When will some gifted filmmaker finally come along to address this issue with the kind of seriousness and gravity that it so obviously deserves? Neither Hopkins nor Rock can be faulted for their performances. They do the best they can with the material they've been handed. Hopkins, in particular though, needs to start signing on to more challenging assignments before the lease runs out on his reputation as one of the world's premier actors. About the best that can be said for "Bad Company" is that it affords us an opportunity to armchair travel to photogenic Prague (remember "Slaughterhouse-Five"). That exquisite locale at least gives us something to look at for the two hours we're stranded in the theatre.
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DVD ~ Anthony Hopkins
DVD ~ Anthony Hopkins
DVD ~ Kirk Acevedo
DVD ~ Al Pacino
DVD ~ Chris Rock
