The Skulls is a terribly difficult film to evaluate because it offers us occasional moments of genuine insight mired in a matrix of the ridiculous. And one can't help suspecting that the reason the word 'matrix' comes to mind is because Joshua Jackson apparently learned his craft under the tutelage of the inimical but apparently not inimitable Keanu Reeves.

Despite the homicidal impulses that the wretched performances of this film are likely to spawn in most viewers, there are some redeeming qualities in the screenplay. At first it seems like just another film that we've all seen too many times before. It is the story of an ambitious townie (presumably from New Haven, since everything about the film points to Yale as the setting), a young man with good sense and what seems to be a strong moral grounding to counter his ambition. But his ambition will lead him to make one compromise after another. And before he knows it, he will be one of the bad guys.

Our townie (Jackson) is named Lucas McNamara, and he wants more than anything to be accepted into a powerful secret society known as the Skulls. In order to be considered for that organization, however, he must not contaminate or demean himself by joining any others. Metaphorically speaking, he must maintain his fraternal virginity so that when the Skulls select him, they will know that they aren't getting damaged goods.

When he is finally accepted into the organization, he is paired with his preordained 'soul-mate,' Caleb Mandrake (Paul Walker). And as if the concept of a fraternal soul-mate isn't sufficiently charged with homoeroticism, we are immediately presented with a soul-mate pairing from an earlier generation of Skulls. Caleb's father, Judge Litten Mandrake, is played by Craig T. Nelson, who simply oozes the revolting masculinity of an NCAA football coach (his one trick) as he introduces his own soul-mate, Martin Lombard (Christopher McDonald), a soft-spoken, pampered-looking, maternal figure of a man. Lombard and the older Mandrake spat with one another like an old married couple, particularly when it comes to Caleb.

The film does some interesting work with this idea of masculine pairings. Most intriguing, perhaps, is its depiction of heterosexuality as a vapid and profoundly unsatisfying approach to life in the ridiculously overwrought love scene between Luke McNamara and his girlfriend Chloe (Leslie Bibb). They do an awful lot of extremely clumsy kissing in that scene that doesn't so much say, "I am passionate about kissing you" as it screams, "I would like to delude myself into thinking that I am passionate about kissing you." What convinces me that director Rob Cohen wanted the scene to be atrocious is that it is so inessential to the plot and could very easily have been cut. We have a couple of college kids who are frightened for their lives and know that they are under constant surveillance. But even though the matter at hand would seem to be exposing the organization that is persecuting them, they feel compelled to make a very clumsy sort of love with each other. The plotline itself demands for the scene to be cut almost as ferociously as their insipid attempt to generate something resembling chemistry.

In fact, if we pay attention to the film, we find that Luke's soul-mate before he joined the Skulls was never really Chloe, but rather his friend Will Beckford (Hill Harper). That Beckford is black is not incidental. According to the rules as we all learned them from Steven Spielberg, Beckford's blackness necessitates his being murdered at some point. Nothing new there. But what is interesting is that Luke will ultimately reject his Skull-assigned soul-mate (Caleb) not for Chloe, but for justice concerning his dead black friend. Because this sense of loyalty is coupled with the homoerotic charge of male relationships in the film, writer John Pogue seems to be attempting to insert his script into the trajectory of the great American novel.

Leslie Fiedler has argued (quite compellingly) that our nearest and dearest American literary heroes are generally white males who pair themselves off not with white females, but with non-white males. As his examples, he gives us Twain's Huck Finn and Jim, Melville's Ishmael and Queequeg, Cooper's Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, and Faulkner's Ike McCaslin and Sam Fathers, among others. In books, the white protagonists usually resolve their dilemmas by standing up for (or otherwise reconciling themselves to) their non-white counterparts. But in film, the mainstream tendency has always been to sublimate and legitimize the homoerotic impulse by eliminating the non-white friend so as to enable the white hero to ride off into the sunset with the even whiter girl.

The Skulls takes a different approach. The last person that Luke embraces in the film is not Chloe, but Caleb Mandrake, as Luke must tackle Mandrake in an act of love that prevents the young man from shooting himself.

Another bit of hilariously subtle writing occurs with regard to the 'violence' that Luke must do in order to resist the Skulls. He doesn't just start shooting people in order to save himself; in fact, he never does any more damage than he has to. He breaks into the Skulls' secret video library armed with mace and a taser to use on the guard, which is kind of silly, considering that his life is on the line. But things become even sillier when he leads the Skulls that are chasing him into an alley where his friends club them into unconsciousness. They had planned the ambush and had chosen to arm themselves with clubs, not guns. Of course, there's no escaping the fact that clubs are weapons, more inherently 'violent' than mace sprays and tasers. So just as the viewer is coming to terms with whether the use of clubs was quite fair, one of the good guys immobilizes the bad guys' vehicle by using--you guessed it--the Club. And locking a steering wheel down simply has to be construed as a non-violent form of resistance, get it?

I also liked the other absurd lengths to which Pogue went in order to keep clear the distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys. The bad guys invariably do things that are both A) illegal and B) immoral. The good guys only do things that are one or the other. Luke's decision to break into the Skulls' video library, for instance, is certainly illegal. But since he's doing it in an effort to seek justice for his dead friend, it's not immoral. When Lombard tries to protect Luke from the machinations of the evil Judge Litton, Litton's response is to blackmail him with a file concerning the affair he is having. Now it may be immoral for a fiftyish senator to have a fling with a nineteen-year-old woman, but it certainly isn't illegal. I have to applaud Pogue's decision to impose such nonsense on an audience as the idea that the nastiest skeleton in an established senator's closet would be a consensual dalliance with an adult woman.

Touches such as these made The Skulls more than bearable for me. I soon learned to look past the acting (or the whatever-it-was-that-those-idiots-on-the-screen-were-doing) and to concentrate on the little jokes and finesses that are scattered throughout the story. If you can approach a film in this way, you might be able to get a kick out of this movie.

Recommended: Yes