Bad Company

When a top CIA agent is assassinated, his streetwise twin brother (Chris Rock) is recruited to fill in on a mission to retrieve a briefcase nuke, under the skeptical gaze of veteran spymaster Anthony Hopkins. Director Joel Schumacher gets things off to a pretty good start, with decent performances from Rock and Hopkins, but it only lasts for about 20 minutes. After all, this is producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s film more than Schumacher’s, and Bruckheimer (having exhausted his urge to make important films after Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down) reverts to his usual M.O.: plenty of slam!bang!pow!crash!, and no more script than it takes to get from one burst of gunfire to the next. Writers Gary Goodman, David Himmelstein, Jason Richman and Michael Browning, nonentities all, are happy to oblige.