Triple Echhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I've got good news and bad news.

The bad news runs something like this. There's a JFK-style conspiracy to kill the president, one that tracks back to his chief of staff. Jack-booted thugs have infiltrated an underground spook complex in Virginia and have been hard at work eliminating the next James Bond - so that picking off the president will be as easy as rigging an election in Florida.

The good news goes something like this: Ice Cube is on the job. Or at least he will be. Just as soon as he makes a daring escape, using an ingenious method borrowed from the 1975 Charles Bronson actioner, Breakout. If Ice Cube can manage to go back to the old neighborhood - which is the first place the cops are going to search - maybe all will work out. He can look up an old flame, who chops cars in a giant complex only a search warrant away from a police raid. If she still remembers "the good times," she can give him an exotic street racer so that he can save the world in style. In the meantime, his handler, Samuel Jackson, can run back to the house and grab those unsecured smoking-gun documents.

Okay, I lied. There is no good news. This movie is awful from beginning to end. If it were a horse, I'd shoot it. It's a black hole of talent, which gets wasted on mind-numbing lines that rewrite the boundaries between insipidness and an Andy Kaufman stunt. The first XXX was a marriage of convenience between marketers (who wanted to grab those "extreme" gen-x survivor types) and Vin Diesel, who needed the money (probably for head wax). This XXX is more like a redneck divorce, where Bubba brings his replacement skank to the snake pit where the knot will be cut - but not before somebody loses an eye.

This movie is like the action/adventure version of Soul Plane, with an endless series of desperate attempts to find the soul of wit in playing "the black angle" in a sequel to a movie that glorified a white skinhead. Is it any surprise that its screenwriter, Simon Kinberg, is a white guy? Apparently, this is how one applies an MFA from Columbia - when he isn't acting as script doctor to such classics as Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Elektra - both of which benefited so, so much from his unbridled talent.

Earth to Simon: Black people aren't this dumb. I've met a few. Not one of my friends would try to break out of prison by climbing on top of a roof - and hoping the white guard won't shoot - or jumping off a multistoried building in the hopes that a helicopter will swoop down, avoid turning him into confetti with the rotors and provide him a safe, secure means of escape by having him hold onto the landing gear as the helicopter whips about - while sharpshooters miss an obvious target.

Then again, none of my black friends ever wanted to be called Ice Cube. Tea Spoon, maybe. Salad Fork, perhaps. Definitely Lemon Wedge. But not Ice Cube. At this point, I'd settle for Vanilla Ice - whose singing can't possibly be as bad as I.C.'s acting. Dig up Milly Vanilli while you're at it. Let them do the soundtrack.

But I digress.

The basic plot is like John LeCarre for idiots. The White House Chief of Staff, former-General George "Octavius" Deckert (Willem Dafoe) is conspiring to kill President James Sanford (Peter Strauss). To do that, he needs all the really, really, really good agents out of the way, which is why he has wiped out members of the elite Delta Force recruited by Agent "Augustus" Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson). Deciding to recruit someone "off the radar," he meets with Darius Stone (Ice Cube), a soldier he commanded in Kosovo - who got left holding the bag after Gibbons staged a mutiny (out of conscience). Gibbons helps Stone break out of prison so the two of them can foil the dastardly plot. To pull this off, Stone will need the help of former-girlfriend-turned-sexy-car-chopper, Lola Jackson (Nona Gaye). He'll also need the help of an uber-white-guy version of Q, whose uber-whiteness originates from the blue sweater he wears as a jacket vest.

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

The first thing that struck me was the plot. Bad guys know the location of a secret, underground facility with minimal security. When national security has been breached, and 16 people die, maybe it's time to look for a mole - or a psychic. DOD sends Agent Kyle Steele (Scott Speedman) who strolls through the crime scene sipping coffee from Starbucks and making jokes. We know, from pulpy film noir, that hardboiled detectives are supposed to do such things - when investigating their murder of the week, but Steele is hardly old enough to buy a lottery ticket - and this is a serious breach of national defense.

And then there's Samuel Jackson, concluding that he needs a fresh face, someone "off the radar" - because this sort of thing has to be stopped by the unstoppable. And where are we going to find such a guy? In prison. One hopes this guy is better at dodging bullets than he is at dodging cops. Forget about his Bourne Identity moves, his Charles Bronson breakout and that homing beacon, resting near his fly, that sends him back to the old neighborhood - and into the arms of an old flame who chops cars. This guy is a toolkit of unnecessary moves - turned into "go for the gold" stunts that are more laughable than cool. He karate-chops the bad guys when a bullet would be faster. He swims through a hailstorm of lead. He eats french fries when he ought to be eating his girlfriend's ... ahem ... cooking.

Then there's the acting, which boggles the mind. Willem Dafoe turns in yet another performance as a snake. Fine. If he wants to be The English Patient for the rest of his life, all power to him. But if he's going to play the White House Chief of Staff - shouldn't the actor who blew us away in Platoon, Last Temptation of Christ and The Clearing at least consider the kind of personality who ends up running the White House? Let's look at a few names: James Baker, John Sununu, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Al Haig, H.R. Haldeman. Do any of these guys look like wimps? Did any of them even pretend to be weak-willed and unsure? Dafoe totally blows the role from the getgo.

But he's not alone. Samuel Jackson practically mails in his performance. On the flip side, Ice Cube tries too hard. He's the eager beaver, in need of an acting lesson, punching each line as if he were afraid of a hanging chad. If this guy were put in charge of an assignment, it wouldn't be because he's so freaking dangerous. It wouldn't be because he's just oozing with talent. It would simply be the need to find someone dumb enough to be thrown down a well.

Finally, there's the dialogue, some of the worst dial-a-prayer mush I have ever heard. The perfunctory speeches - between Stone and Gibbons, or between Stone and Jackson - are veritable screechers. The interchanges go shrill in a heartbeat. Dafoe's monologuing is cheesy stuff. It's the kind of stuff that better films would spoof, but here it's a joke wasted on characters who don't have a clue as to how ridiculous they are. It's almost bad as a scene, late in the film, where massive amounts of hardware are being stored together - including a tank and a troop carrier.

It's all so incredibly bad, I stayed and watched it simply for the laugh. Which is not to say the film doesn't occasionally pull a rabbit out of its hat. At one point, Stone has to "blend in" at a Washington party. He does so by donning a white jacket and pretending to be a servant. When he gets spotted, he finds a way to turn his surroundings - and clothing - to his advantage. I won't go into the details, but it's an example of what this film might have been - with a better script. Lee Tamahori, who directed this film (along with Mulholland Falls, The Edge, Along Came a Spider and Die Another Day) - tries to breathe life into the script, but it's an uphill battle - both ways.

There are some genuinely inspired shots, but they're in the service of a story that is beyond bad. Given its $26 million take - a mere down-payment on its production costs, this is more of a write-off than anything else. It's testament to the adage that "actors have to eat, too." If only somebody's dog had eaten the script, just imagine what a second draft (or third, or fourth, or fifth) might have come up with. Instead, what we've got here is a placeholder, a little cardboard book-mark of sorts. It reminds us that there was a film to shoot. The filmmakers just didn't know what it is.