'Masterminds'

Maybe there have been worse. My sieve brain mercifully allows much of the bad to slip away along with far too much of the good.

But I think I’m on steady ground when I say that "Masterminds" is the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I can only hope my brain stays the course and jettisons any flickers of this nonsense as soon as possible.

So let’s get this over with. Patrick Stewart plays a debonair security expert hired by a private school, which he then takes over with a team of commandos. The scheme is to kidnap some rich kids whose parents run some big corporations, ask for a lot of money and then skedaddle.

But Ozzie Paxton (Vincent Kartheiser), a rebellious teen who’d been kicked out of the place the year before, gets trapped in the school after dropping off his little stepsister and takes a few cues from Macaulay Culkin to foil the evil conspirators. This includes the by-now obligatory computer-hacking tricks, the scootching along air ducts to eavesdrop, the hot-wiring of everything in sight from phones to closed-circuit TV to the sprinkler system.

In this hack mixture of "Home Alone," "Over the Edge," "Mad Max" and "Die Hard," there’s not even enough unintentional humor to make it campy fun. It’s smug, insulting filmmaking. Avoid it.

MASTERMINDS (PG-13) — Contains lots of implied violence and some profanity.