Bad Company Review
by Eugene Novikov (eugenen AT wharton DOT upenn DOT edu)July 22nd, 2002
Bad Company (2002)
Reviewed by Eugene Novikov
http://www.ultimate-movie.com/
Starring Anthony Hopkins, Chris Rock, Matthew Marsh, Kerry Washington, Peter Stormare.
Directed by Joel Schumacher
Rated PG-13.
"Classical, you mean like Run DMC?"
Bad Company is a lame, trite buddy cop action comedy, worse even than Bait, the pretty-bad movie to which it is identical. Here, Chris Rock replaces Jamie Foxx as the urban crook who suddenly has to save the world, and the never boring Anthony Hopkins replaces David Morse as the government agent who has to work with him, but the movie isn't even trying. How else do you explain the title, which has headlined almost a dozen movies before this one?
Rock is Kevin Pope, a New York City ticket scalper whose twin brother, Jake Hayes, was a CIA operative who set up an undercover deal with a weapons merchant just before being shot. His boss, Gaylord Oaks (Hopkins) wants to keep the operation afloat at all costs, recruiting Pope at a cost of $50,000 to play the part of his brother. To pull this off, Kevin has to learn how to speak proper English, pretend to like classical music, pass himself off as a wealthy antiques dealer and not get himself killed in the process.
Of course, Kevin also has a girlfriend who is getting ready to leave town while he is hanging out in Europe with his newfound friends. His allegiances are tested as she torments him with phone calls while Gaylord pours a pitcher of ice cold water on his forehead to wake him up at 5 am each morning while his twin's improbably beautiful significant other proves to be a temptation. It's a hard life, ya know?
Joel Schumacher, whose career took a nosedive after Falling Down isn't known for his comic timing. And, even armed as it is with the appealing pair of Rock and Hopkins, Bad Company is jaw-droppingly stupid, thinly disguising buddy movie conventions and expecting us to swallow them whole. It's not funny, as both Rock's attempts to become "cultured" and Hopkins's task of becoming tolerant of the other's urban persona, are treated as the uninspired clichÎs that they are. It's supposed to be funny to hear Hopkins utter unspeakables such as "get in the car, bitch," but it's just
embarrassing.
It hardly helps that the movie is just as much a failure in the action department. Under the experienced but indistinctive direction of Schumacher, the done and re-done elements of the script become even more blasÎ. The obligatory car chases and shoot-outs, try as they might to be at least marginally clever, occasionally amuse but never quicken the pulse. And I did not think that I would ever again see a new movie that ended in a race against a ticking red timer to defuse a bomb threatening to destroy a metropolis. This particular instance is almost aggressively typical, refusing to add any sort of twist or deviation from the bare-bones high concept.
This is, even when all else fails, an Anthony Hopkins movie, and though we're never quite sure what the man who just a few years threatened to retire from acting is doing in a project this embarrassingly frivolous, he is still mesmerizing. But even with his presence, Bad Company somehow manages to become Bait-lite.
Grade: C-
Up Next: Y tu Mamá También
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