How would you like trying to manage your investment portfolio if your stockbroker lived on Neptune? You phone him a sell order for your Firestone shares, the call takes three months to get there, the reply takes three months to get back, and by then your investments are less viable than a thong shop in Afghanistan. That’s how it is for actors, though. They have to negotiate deals a couple films in advance, not knowing how completed projects net yet released will influence their marketability months later. Hilary Swank could be bought cheap for a couple little films booked between the time she did Boys Don’t Cry and then won her Oscar. But from now on her contract will stipulate she be provided platinum chopsticks to spear the organic sashimi flown in fresh from Hokkaido three times daily to her Lexus RV. So maybe Jamie Foxx, who got some good reviews for his role as upstart QB “Steamin’” Willie Beamen in Oliver Stone’s gridiron fable Any Given Sunday, can be forgiven for signing on to this vapid excess from former video director Antoine Fuqua (The Replacement Killers).
Nah. Especially since he once again dredges up a tired Mike Tyson impression, which was also on display in his last post-Sunday movie, Held Up (a film at least notable for its simple audacity). Here he plays inept seafood-thief Alvin Sanders, rooming at the rebar hotel with a cardiac-impaired felon (Robert Pastorelli) who’s hidden $42 million in gold stolen from the NYC Federal Reserve. An obsessive treasury agent (David Morse) gets Alvin released in hope of smoking out the robbery’s mastermind, a mean ubergeek superhacker (Doug Hutchison, who played weasely death-row guard Percy Wetmore in The Green Mile) given to chronic John Malkovich impersonations. The Feds go to great lengths to keep Alvin happy and under surveillance, but he gets into various kinds of trouble involving cars, guns, bombs, and horses, all realized by Fuqua in an occasionally energetic style would have been impressive three years ago. Bait just starts to get interesting before a formulaic finale comes along to ruin what little good will the self-effacing Foxx, who can be a fairly funny guy when he’s not repeating himself, has accumulated. C-
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