June 7, 2002 | This weekend at your friendly neighborhood megaplex, you can take your pick of nightmare scenarios. On one screen, there’s the deadly serious nuking of Baltimore in The Sum of All Fears. Starting today, however, you can choose, instead, to see how the threat of a similar disaster can be played for laughs – or at least mild chuckles – in Bad Company, a rapid-fire cloak-and-dagger comedy-drama.
While watching either film, you’re bound to be disturbed by inadvertent but unavoidable reminders of real-life terrorist attacks and the possibilities of future catastrophes. At one point in Bad Company, someone asks the CIA spook played by Anthony Hopkins how a nuclear weapon could be smuggled into Manhattan. The spook calmly replies: “You’d be surprised what you can send by air freight.” Which, of course, may very well be true. But it’s not what many of us might like to think about while enjoying an otherwise innocuous popcorn flick.
Bad Company is much easier to take while it’s focusing on relatively harmless slam-bang thrills and spills – that is, while the threat of nuclear terrorism in Manhattan is nothing more than a plot-goosing gimmick, or what Alfred Hitchcock used to call a McGuffin. Fortunately, so much of the movie is so frankly fantastic that it only occasionally chills you with a hint of something genuinely upsetting.
The only thing that’s even mildly disconcerting during the opening scenes is the stern-faced appearance of Hopkins’ co-star, comic actor Chris Rock. The setting is Prague, where CIA agent Gaylord Oaks (Hopkins) and top operative Kevin Pope (Rock) put a $1 million down payment on a suitcase-size nuclear weapon brokered by a Russian black-marketer. Unfortunately, there’s a rival bidder for the merchandise. One thing leads to another, and Pope is fatally wounded during an ambush.
But don’t worry: Chris Rock is alive and well and living in New York, where he’s also cast as Jake Hayes, a motor-mouth chess hustler and ticket scalper. Jake doesn’t know he has – or, to be more precise, had – a long-lost, separated-at-birth twin brother. But he’s brought up to speed when Oaks and company appear on the scene, using smooth talk and big bucks to coax Jake into posing as his sibling just long enough to complete the Prague deal 10 days hence.
Jake reluctantly agrees, and not just because of the big bucks. Screenwriters Jason Richman and Michael Browning obviously learned a lot from the chapter of Screenwriting for Dummies that encourages would-be scribes to make even selfish hustlers as sympathetic as possible. So Jake gets a noble motive: He wants to convince his nursing-student girlfriend, Julie (Kerry Washington), that he’s not as immature — or at least not as chronically broke — as she fears.
Richman and Browning must have paid even closer attention to other chapters of that how-to book, because they rarely stray from the formulaic during the modestly amusing scenes in which the streetwise Jake is taught how to pass himself off as his late brother, a wise and worldly Navy Academy grad and globetrotting CIA op.
Bad Company doesn’t really begin to percolate until agents of the rival bidder arrive in New York to kill “Kevin Pope.” Naturally, their attack fails. But it generates an exciting shoot-out between CIA ops and terrorist gunmen.
More important, in Oaks’ view, the attempted assassination means the bad guys – and, presumably, the Russian black marketer – accept the ruse that Kevin Pope is still alive.
Bad Company hops back to Prague for some more briskly paced gunplay, then returns to Manhattan for a tense showdown with a terrorist from the former Yugoslavia. The terrorist wants to “punish” the West for ignoring the protracted implosion of his homeland by detonating that suitcase-size nuke in downtown Manhattan. (A plot twist, it should be noted, that the movie lifts from 1997’s The Peacemaker.) Oaks and Jake, not surprisingly, are eager to pre-empt the big bang.
Joel Schumacher (The Client, A Time to Kill) is credited as director of Bad Company, but the true auteur of the piece clearly is Jerry Bruckheimer (The Rock, Enemy of the State). Indeed, all the Bruckheimer hallmarks – A-list actors cast as B-movie archetypes, a thunderous musical score, lots of high-tech machinery and an abundance of moodily lit, bluish-gray interiors – are on display in one slick, sleek package.
Hopkins breezes through the proceedings with an appealingly jaded nonchalance – note the casual way Oaks pumps one last bullet into a fallen bad guy – that easily morphs into steely authority whenever such stern stuff is required. Rock is too broad – and, worse, a bit too borderline-offensive caricature-like – whenever Jake whines, screams and otherwise expresses mortal fear. But he’s very good in scenes where Jake stands up for himself, and even better during the relatively serious beat-the-clock heroics of the movie’s final half-hour.
As an odd-couple, buddy-buddy action-comedy, Bad Company is a mixed bag. The comical bits often are so overplayed that they actually get in the way of the familiar but effective thriller elements. But there are a few truly hilarious moments, mostly when Hopkins and Rock play off against each other without raising their voices. There are probably lots of people out there who will pay first-run admission prices just to hear Hopkins mimicking gangsta-speak while telling Rock, in his trademark mellifluous voice, “Get in the car, bitch!”
