Bad Company (2002)

Bad Company arrives from the Jerry Bruckheimer factory with the grim efficiency of a munitions order. A Harvard-educated CIA agent dies in the first reel, and the agency recruits his twin brother, a Jersey City hustler played by Chris Rock, to impersonate him. Anthony Hopkins is the handler assigned to sand down the rough edges. Joel Schumacher directs with his customary indifference to coherence, and the whole enterprise grinds toward a suitcase bomb in Grand Central Station. It earned sixty-six million dollars against a seventy million dollar budget. The lesson, as ever, is that explosions do not guarantee an audience.

The pairing of Rock and Hopkins was sold as creative casting, and Bruckheimer said as much at the time. The film offers the familiar interracial buddy arrangement that powered 48 Hrs., Lethal Weapon, and Rush Hour before it. Black performers fill out the supporting ranks: Kerry Washington as the girlfriend, Garcelle Beauvais as the reporter, Irma P. Hall as the foster mother. This is standard commercial practice for 2002, not a statement of any kind. The film has no interest in what race means, in inequality, in identity. Its only interest is the next shootout.

There is no sermon here. No queer characters anywhere in the frame, no lesson about climate or corporate power, no meditation on bodies or brains, no revision of the historical record, no gender politics to speak of. Women wait by telephones or file dispatches from the Balkans. The release was pushed from December 2001 because the plot involved terrorists striking New York, a scheduling matter and not a moral one. Critics were unkind, and correctly so. We are left with a relic of an era when a studio could spend seventy million dollars on a mismatched buddy picture and simply fail, without anyone insisting it carried a message.