A few years back, producer Jerry Bruckheimer made a film (Enemy of the State) in which a sassy Negro (Will Smith) became entangled in a harebrained government operation and prevailed only with the help of a cranky middle-aged cracker (Gene Hackman).  Bruckheimer is back with another film in which pretty much the same thing happens, only with far less success.

Originally due in theatres last Christmas but delayed after 9/11 (the modified ending no longer includes a bad guy specifically threatening to blow up the financial district in lower Manhattan), Bad Company is the rare film whose title battles its script for the coveted honor of Worst Idea of the Month (fortunately, it opens the same day as Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood).  It's pretty sub-par, even for a Bruckheimer summer extravaganza, despite the inclusion of all of the prerequisites (paper-thin characters, cringeworthy dialogue, bad music, handfuls of plot holes and bad guys with bad aim).  Bruckheimer & Co. would have saved millions and millions of dollars had they just used footage from the films they ripped off to make Company.

Here, our Negro everyman is Jake Hayes (Chris Rock, Down to Earth), a chess-hustling, ticket-scalping, part-time DJ who finds himself suddenly and tenaciously recruited by a CIA agent named Gaylord Oakes (Anthony Hopkins, Hearts in Atlantis).  It seems that the twin brother Jake never knew he had was just killed in a CIA operation to purchase a suitcase-sized Russian nuclear weapon on the black market (didn't we just see this shit last week in The Sum of All Fears?).  Oakes needs Jake to pretend to be his dead twin in order to complete the transaction, which is set to take place in just nine days.  If Oakes' attempt fails, the seller (Peter Stormare, Watching Ellie) will put the weapon into the hands of a group of anti-American terrorists.

You can practically write the rest yourself.  Oakes trains Jake to pass as his brother (who was a rich, Harvard-educated, classical-music-loving bore) in the first half of the film, while the second half is the big action-packed spectacular with the gunplay and the explosions and the "Oh, Lord, please don't shoot me, Whitey!"  It's the kind of thing you'd expect from a screenplay concocted by Michael Browning (Six Days, Seven Nights) and first-timer Jason Richman.  My favorite parts were the scenes involving a laptop computer that is somehow able to perform a retina scan through its monitor, even when the subject's eye is nowhere near it.

Occasionally nailing a zinger or two, Rock often looks embarrassed to be uttering his poorly written lines, which practically reduce him to the level of a Stepin Fetchit.  His scenes as his character's twin are particularly awful, with Rock coming across nearly as wooden as any character from Attack of the Clones.  Hopkins too suffers from the script, as his character is about as fleshed out as a frigging skeleton, which might explain why he looks about as sleepy as Pacino in Insomnia.  The two have so little chemistry, I wouldn't be surprised to learn director Joel Schumacher instructed them to never speak to each other unless the camera was rolling.  Schumaker recently regained some street cred after making Tigerland, but he's still the guy who ruined the Batman franchise and who hasn't had a non-John-Grisham-inspired hit in nearly 10 years.

The two best things about Company are its Prague setting (for about half of the film) and the photography by Polish cinematographer Dariusz Wolski (The Crow, Dark City).  When you combine the two, Company is awfully pretty. When each takes a backseat to the story and acting, Company is pretty awful.

1:59 –

for intense sequences of violent action, some sensuality and language