September 14–21, 2000

movie shorts

Bait

Jamie Foxx is on the run in Antoine (The Replacement Killers) Fuqua’s sensationally stylish and surprisingly smart entry in a burgeoning subgenre that a friend of mine calls "neo fugitive slave narratives." Like Most Wanted, U.S. Marshals, Enemy of the State, Blue Streak and others, Bait features a black man running from the law, usually embodied by an imposing white government/military official (say, Jon Voight). Here the head lawman is David Morse, renowned for his extralegal tactics. His team implants a madly high-tech tracking device in smalltime crook Foxx’s jaw, because they think he has info on the whereabouts of $42 million in gold, also being sought by the man who stole and lost it nearly two years before, a John Malkovichian psycho-computer genius (Doug Hutchison, Percy in The Green Mile). Plot-point-wise, Bait is not news: Foxx has a no-good brother (Michael Epps), a lovely and intelligent girlfriend (Kimberly Elise), a new baby and a couple of "comic" Latino brother-thugs on his ass. Still, the film puts entertaining spins on routine devices, like the car chases, which are beautifully shot and fast-cut almost to the point of unreadability (strangely, this makes them quite thrilling to watch). And it righteously interrogates class/race relations: The smug white surveillance team, overhearing everything in Foxx’s "street" existence (including the inevitable sex scene), is occasionally confused, discomforted and outsmarted. Foxx, by the way, is excellent, quirky, subtle, and quite able to keep up with the movie’s lurching tone-and-genre shifts, from comedy to action to almost-arty to melodrama.

—Cindy Fuchs