The Jamie Foxx vehicle Bait was released with little fanfare or public attention in the States and with good reason. It's implausible, uninspired, and, what no action movie should be, boring. Avoid this movie unless you're a die hard Jamie Foxx fan and ha ve nothing better to do until Any Given Sunday is released on video.

Foxx plays Alvin Sanders, an inept thief who is arrested after robbing a seafood warehouse. Once released, Sanders attempts to put his life back together. He wavers between looking for an honest job and returning to his life of crime, and he attempts to p atch things up with the girlfriend he left behind.

Jamie Foxx is by far the best thing in this movie. Foxx has a great sense of comic timing. Watching Sanders explain his get rich scheme to steal prawns ("they're not shrimp," he explains) to his friend while outside of a seemingly abandoned warehouse was actually one of the few amusing moments in the movie. Foxx also makes a decent action hero, though his transformation from clown to superman occurs in under thirty minutes. As the obsessed Clenteen David Morse tries to be morally ambiguous but only ends u p being repellant. Audiences would hardly have empathised with Tommy Lee Jones' character in The Fugitive if he beat innocent prisoners and knew that Ford was innocent but used him to flush out the real killer.

Many action movies these days are derivative, but none since Chill Factor have been as uninspired as Bait. Whole scenes are directly lifted from Die Hard, Goldeneye, and even Rush Hour. Action movies don't necessarily have to break new ground to be entert aining, but they're hardly exciting if they're so predictable you can see each new plot point minutes before it develops.

Jamie Foxx has a lot of potential, and even a poor script and direction can't completely hide his talent. And it is nice to see a studio give a starring role in an action movie to an African-American star besides Wesley Snipes. Even if Bait weren't wholly shoddy and unoriginal, however, the world would hardly need another Hollywood action movie. Besides, Wesley Snipes wouldn't touch a movie like Bait with a ten-foot pole.