Jamie Kennedy

An improvement on 2006's The Reef, this underwater adventure doesn't hold a candle to big studio animation, but its deeply ridiculous plot is charmingly scruffy. Compared to Pixar or DreamWorks, the animation here is fairly ropey, mainly in the design stage as the artists place human faces on the fish, but the surprisingly deranged humour keeps us smiling.

In the first film, plucky little Pi (voiced by Bell) managed to banish nasty shark Troy (Logue) from the reef. But Troy has now escaped from his human captors, who beefed him up with bulking-up drugs. During low tide, he can't get into the reef, so he sends the tiny shark Ronny (Kennedy) in disguise to prepare for his grand return at high tide in four days. Ronny's main job is to prevent Pi from teaching the other fish how to harness the "power of the sea" to defeat Troy, so Ronny distracts them by staging an elaborate variety show. This disrupts Pi's bootcamp, sparking the hammy performer in his wife Cordelia (Philipps), so Pi turns to his guru, the wise turtle Narissa (Schneider), for help.

Clearly, Ronny's undersea stage show was conceived as a way for the animators to go completely wild with music and colour, and it works. These scenes are hilariously silly, packed with breakdancing prawns and jellyfish choreography. There are also movie references and watery puns (like a reference to "Buoyancé Knowles"), plus a stream of military gags, as everyone prepares for battle. Most of these jokes are funny in a way the imagery can't live up to. Animated in Korea, the direction is often awkward and the imagery sometimes plasticky.

Continue reading: The Reef 2: High Tide Review

The long-delayed sequel to the 1994 Jim Carrey hit is a terrible movie. Let's not mince words. It's an awful, unoriginal, infuriating, and endless mess. The always likeable Jamie Kennedy stars as Tom Avery, a struggling animator whose life is in flux. His wife, Tonya (Traylor Howard from TV's Monk), wants a baby badly, but the immature Tom doesn't want that responsibility. He's content to play with his precocious dog, Otis, draw on his sketch pad, and kid around with his tolerant wife.

Continue reading: Son Of The Mask Review

Director Anthony Fuqua doesn't seem terribly interested in the plot of "Bait," a impotent "Enemy of the State" knock-off that reeks of a sloppy re-write designed to accommodate the comedy stylings of Jamie Foxx in the Will Smith-type role.

Fuqua's main focus is turning the picture into a resume-builder and he spends the whole two hours showing off his technique. Dripping with visual flair overkill, the chase scenes, stunts and explosions get the deluxe treatment. A 30-second sex scene is shot from about 20 angles. Even a throwaway speech Foxx gives about missing his father (it's just a line to get his ex-girlfriend in the sack) is filmed with four or five cameras -- one of them restlessly circling him as he mock-emotes -- and edited with slow-motion effects and multiple fade-ins and fade-outs.

"Lookie what I can do!" Fuqua seems to be saying, much as he did in "The Replacement Killers," Chow Yun-Fat's Hong-Kong-style American debut. "Please don't send me back to making music videos!"

Continue reading: Bait Review

A Generation X cautionary tale about greed and impatience, "Boiler Room" is a sharp-edged, adrenaline-driven movie that takes place in the eat-or-be-eaten world of crooked stock trading.

Populated by 25-year-old, overnight millionaires who wear their testosterone on the sleeves of their tailored Armani suits, this is an imposing, vigorous and pulsating picture that could have been mighty and portentous if writer-director Ben Younger hadn't cribbed half the script from "Wall Street" and "Glengarry Glen Ross."

Giovanni Ribisi ("The Mod Squad") plays an unscrupulous college dropout looking to make a quick buck with an underground casino he runs from his rented row house. But he starts seeing much bigger dollar signs when a newly-rich (and Ferrari-driving) acquaintance recruits him to cold-call moneyed suckers and pitch them investments for his suspicious brokerage startup.

Continue reading: Boiler Room Review

There are exactly two funny performances in "Malibu's Most Wanted" -- a one-joke comedy about an over-privileged white-boy wannabe rapper -- and neither of them are by top-liner and co-writer Jamie Kennedy.

Expanding on a two-bit sketch character from his self-titled WB network variety show, Kennedy plays B-Rad G (nee Brad Gluckman), a pathetic poser "from the 'Bu," where "everybody's strapped with a nine" (nine-iron, that is) and "most of the time the police won't even come through" (because the town is pretty much crime-free).

Being from a straight-laced political family, Brad has become such an embarrassment to his father's gubernatorial campaign that daddy (Ryan O'Neal) hires two Juilliard theater graduates to play gangstaz, kidnap the brat and drop him in Compton to scare the imaginary "ghetto" out of him.

Continue reading: Malibu's Most Wanted Review

Somewhere out there in the cinematic ether there's an elusive line between lewdly moronic raunch comedies like "Tomcats" or "Freddy Got Fingered" and sophomoric, low-brow sex and gross-out romps that can make even intellectual types laugh until $3 concession Coca-Cola comes out of their noses.

I don't know where that line is exactly. All I know is that "Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back" is hilarious.

The latest low-budget, high-dialogue laffer from Kevin Smith -- writer-director of "Clerks," "Mallrats," "Chasing Amy" and "Dogma" -- this film puts his perennial cameo characters front and center for a combination road-trip/ruthless Hollywood satire that is so blanketed with ribald raillery it feels like machine-gun fire hitting your funny bone.

Continue reading: Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back Review

There is a key to good'n'stupid lowbrow comedy that few lowbrow moviemakers understand, and it is this: If you have a thin but serviceable premise upon which to build cheap, vulgar, tasteless, but side-splitting dumb gags, don't slap together some insipid story clogged with clichés to prop it up -- just run with what you've got.

Don't turn your movie into Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider fodder, full of insulting attempts to make audiences genuinely feel for your imbecile heroes and wishy-washy life lessons for your stock characters to learn in the last act. Don't be an "American Pie" and backpedal on your vulgarity at the last minute with a hypocritical-apology "happy" ending.

Instead, be proudly, shamelessly, flippantly stupid, like "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," in which two recent-grad, odd-couple roommates don't discover anything about themselves, they never see any "bigger picture," and they don't grow up at all. They just get stoned out of their gourds on a Friday night, develop the munchies for those famous square hamburgers from the titular eastern-U.S. fast food joint, and spend the rest of the picture having preposterous misadventures while driving all over New Jersey hunting for the nearest franchise location.

Continue reading: Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle Review