BAD COMPANY [ 1/2]
Formulaic but funny. Running time: 117 minutes. Rated R (profanity, violence, sexuality). At the Empire, the Lincoln Square, the Cinema 1, others.
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ANOTHER week, another movie about CIA agents trying to protect an American city threatened with nuclear annihilation.This time it’s New York, and the bomb is set to go off under Grand Central Terminal.
Don’t worry too much. “Bad Company,” which was postponed from a scheduled Christmas opening in deference to post-Sept. 11 sensibilities, is a comic thriller.
Yet there is much more suspense in this sequence than a similar scene in last week’s “The Sum of All Fears” – which wasn’t intended to be funny.
“Bad Company” is often hilarious, thanks to Chris Rock working at full tilt and his odd-couple chemistry with Anthony Hopkins.
Hopkins plays Oakes, a jaded veteran CIA agent who is forced to recruit Jake Hayes (Rock), a two-bit club deejay and ticket scalper from Jersey City, for an impossible mission.
He needs Jake to impersonate a recently killed, separated-at-birth identical twin brother Jake never knew about.
The brother, posing as an an-
tiquities dealer, was brokering the purchase of a nuclear device in a suitcase on behalf of Oakes and the CIA.
Jake very reluctantly agrees to take on the job after Oakes offers him $100,000 to keep Jake’s long-suffering girlfriend (Kerry Washington) from moving to Seattle.
The story (which is attributed to four writers) is pure fish-out-of-water formula – but Rock’s sarcastic Jake hits it out of the park when he’s required to pass himself off as an erstwhile Rhodes scholar.
And, for the first time, Rock even seems comfortable in the dramatic scenes – like the opening, in which he plays the murdered twin.
Rock receives considerable help from Hopkins, who seems to be having the time of his life firing off guns, slugging bad guys and barking insults at Jake, whom he secretly considers less expendable than his cold-blooded CIA boss (John Slattery).
This typically lavish Jerry Bruckheimer production boasts an excellent cast, including Peter Stormare as a Russian selling the bomb, Matthew Marsh as a psychotic Yugoslav trying to get his hands on the bomb and Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon as the dead brother’s ultra-seductive TV newswoman girlfriend.
Filmed largely in Prague, director Joel Schumacher’s by-the-numbers action sequences – particularly an endless car chase – too often play like a tired reprise of “Mission: Impossible.”
“Bad Company” is on more solidly entertaining ground when the street-wise Rock is telling off the spooks at the CIA – who are inescapably more sympathetic now than when this movie was shot early last year.
Llumenick@nypost.com