The Skulls
*.5 BM
Starring: Joshua Jackson, Paul Walker, Leslie Bibb, Craig T. Nelson, Christopher McDonald

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This movie was lots and lots of dumb.

Luke McNamara (Joshua Jackson) is a poor law student that thinks a secret society that everybody knows about is the answer to his financial problems. But when he joins up, he loses friends and finds out they're bad guys and Craig T. Nelson is their supreme overlord. Then he foils them.

Stupid shit in this movie:

  • The secret society known as The Skulls has a building on or near campus with an enormous skull on a huge tower for all to see, each member of the Skulls has to have a huge unsightly branding on their forearm to be covered with a WATCH at all times, they give ridiculously flashy cars and wealth to all of their members so they can remain safely secretive, but everybody KNOWS about them.
  • Paul Walker.
  • Paul Walker's ridiculous haircut - everything combed forward coming to a perpendicular inch-tall uprising just before the forehead starts. This is the mullet of the next generation.
  • Paul Walker's character's name is CALEB MANDRAKE. The last time I heard this name, it belonged to the dashing young jet-setting doctor on The Days Of Our General Hospital's Hope.
  • A secret society of dubious activities is called The Skulls, giving it the proper amount of intrigue to draw attention to themselves, rather than calling themselves something boring and innocuous like "Business Solutions, Incorporated," which no one would be interested in long enough to expose them.
  • Somehow, novice Skull Lucas manages to become so familiar with the bylaws of the Skulls that he manages to not only open the rulebook directly to the rule he needs to use once he realizes he needs to make them 'die by the rules,' but he somehow has become more knowledgable in Skull rules than Craig T. Nelson, Skull Overlord.
  • Paul Walker calls him "Loo-kiss," where non-dumbasses might call him "Loo-kuss." Maybe that's just a personal problem on my end.
  • The Skulls have all sorts of people - enough influence to control presidents, etc. But for some reason, they have the University Provost guy, a high-ranking bloke, running around doing all the killing and trying-to-run-cars-off-the-road. It seems that they should have an underling do that - maybe some of the new trainees.

Three things in its favor - Craig T. Nelson, and I can see some point in the future when Jackson has a little bit of charisma on screen, but he'll need a script worth a damn. Also, Luke's love interest Chloe has a computer she programs to paint stuff named "Action Jackson" - in loving tribute to the fact that Craig T. Nelson played the villain in the Carl Weathers masterpiece (in which Craig T. Nelson also killed Sharon Stone).

These three things are not enough to make this worth rhino shit in a cheese omelette.

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