Here's a bad sign about _Bad Company_; half the ads for
the new Joel Schumacher potboiler marketed the flick as a
straight-ahead thriller, the other half a jivey odd-couple-cop comedy. In fact, the feature's about an even mix, both parts mediocre.
Anthony Hopkins, looking barely tolerant of the material he's handed, portrays Gaylord Oakes (possibly a nod to William F. Buckley's 007 takeoff Blackford Oakes, or to Hopkin's uncredited cameos in the "Mission Impossible" series). Oakes is a patrician American spymaster in the Czech Republic, after a suitcase-sized thermonuclear device lost by the Russians. Oakes tries to buy the nuke off the black market using his protege, dapper Ivy-League agent Kevin Pope (Chris Rock) as a frontman. But an ambush in Prague by assassins leaves Pope dead and the CIA casting around for a new patsy to retrain as their undercover man, only eight days before the deal goes down.
In a twist going back, I think, to Plautus, Aristophenes, or a couple of Eddie Murphy pics from the '80s, the deceased Kevin had a long-lost twin bro'. Chris Rock encores as Jake Hayes, a NYC ghetto ticket scalper and chess hustler with girlfriend troubles. Even though Oakes gives the scheme "nil to zero" chance of succeeding, the government lets him take charge of turning Hayes into an agent. Pope adored classical music and antiques; Hayes jams on rap and Jennifer Lopez, and we experience the usual "Pygmalion" cross-cultural hijinks as Oakes tries to pass off the con from th'hood as a spook from Harvard. Then off to Eastern Europe, for a confrontion with the bad guys - nondenominational, swarthy, suicide terrorists, so
undifferentiated that when they start betraying and shooting each other you really don't know why or care.
Still, "Bad Company" lurches to a serviceable climax at about the 80-minute mark, with Hopkins risking his Merchant-Ivory dignity, toothpick in teeth, for a chase-punchout a la Indiana Jones, and Chris Rock delivering a fair quota of laughs (even if he has to steal one of the best ones from fellow SNL vet Adam Sandler's "Wedding Singer"). Alas there's more footage left over, and the plot grinds remorselessly to a nuclear countdown in New York City, contrived suspense that doesn't register a Roentgen compared to the competing doomsday drama "The Sum of All Fears." Four writers are credited; you get a sense of them frantically pounding the heart of this material to try and keep it from flatlining. The only moments that worked for me were the initial ones that made one think, yeah, what if a regular guy from the ghetto were pressed into service as a spy? Would street smarts see him through a 007 act? "Bad Company" cruises on that for only so long becoming just plain bad.
Incidentally, there was another cloak-and-dagger thriller called "Bad Company," with Laurence Fishborne and Frank Langella that I haven't seen. This one is so unremarkable that I wouldn't be surprised if it's rapidly forgotten and the title slapped on another espionage potboiler sometime in the next ten years.
When Harvard-educated CIA agent Hayes is killed, the agency recruits his twin brother (Rock) to fill in and finish his last project. Problem is, the t...More at HotMovieSale.com
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