Bad Company

Let's ponder that old head-scratcher: why on earth studios and producers entrust their movies to the hands of Joel Schumacher whose debits include some of the most egregious Hollywood codswallop of the last 20 years (Dying Young, A Time to Kill, two Batmans and Flatliners, for starters). Here street punk Chris Rock is drafted into a CIA operation (Hopkins is the Company's grey eminence) in place of the murdered twin he never knew he had. Cue a crash course in spy school, knee-jerk thrills involving Eastern European terrorists in tight leather trousers, spurious suspense with a nuclear device ticking away at the heart of Manhattan, and some of the least funny shtick this side of global meltdown.