Thief of Prawns
FILM: Bait
DIRECTOR: Antoine Fuqua
STARRING: Jamie Foxx, David Morse
GRADE: B
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HUH? WHA? DUH? ALVIN SANDERS (JAMIE FOXX) WHO BARELY KNOWS ANYTHING AS A FEDERAL INVESTIGATION'S BAIT.
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My guilty pleasure for the fall is Antoine Fuqua's Bait, a largely
formulaic action comedy that succeeds only because it a) embraces its
mediocrity with such utter lack of pretension and b) actually manages to
deliver a surprise or two. Written by Andrew and Adam Scheinman, Bait
stars Jamie Foxx as two-bit crook Alvin Sanders, the notorious thief of prawns.
After Sanders lands in the slammer for stealing shrimp, he's bailed out by
United States Treasury agent Edgar Clenteen (David Morse), who wants to use the
ex-con to lure a notorious and vicious criminal into the open. A murky
electronics expert and cold-blooded killer known as Bristol (Doug Hutchinson,
going the villain route again as he did in The Green Mile) has stolen
$40 million in government gold bullion. Clenteen and his team, naturally, want
it back. But they know Bristol doesn't know where his deceased partner hid
it, and they want to make Bristol think that Sanders does: Bristol the
rat, Alvin the cheese.
Of course, this flick employs lots of scenes of run, hide, chase.
Lots of rounds of ammunition get expended, and the ending sequence set at a
crowded race track only barely makes any sense. Still, I liked the notion that
the good guy is really a bad guy because he cares more about catching the
guilty than protecting the innocent. And I liked the comedy that worked with
considerable more regularity than most of Hollywood's crude attempts at humor.
I found it funny when Alvin tries to get a job at a bar he once robbed and
proves confounded that the owner is so determined to hold a grudge. In Alvin's
eyes, his prior crime was never personal. I also liked the whole goofy concept
of dental work to implant a radio transmitter in a molar. Holy root canal,
Batman, we're on F.M. Sure you can do better. But you can do a lot worse.
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