'Masterminds: Stewart's Class Act

Think of "Masterminds" this way: It's "Die Hard" as reenacted by Hanson.

But if that is so, why think of it at all?

Well, comes the answer, because at least it gives one of the great dazzlers of the age some uncontested room to do the bull moose strut and have a bloody good time at it while earning his money. That would be the great baldy Patrick Stewart, who, at full merry toot, is such a commanding figure that he can survive even a lame exercise like "Masterminds" without breaking a sweat.

Cast as a security expert gone bad who takes over a posh Los Angeles private school and holds the students for a $650 million ransom, Stewart toys with the camera, the audience and the lesser fools in the cast with an aplomb that must be seen to be savored. His is the ironic style of evil, full of quips and flourishes, delicious to the last drop. He is like a bottle of fine aged port on a table full of half-empty cans of flat Diet Pepsi: A waste, but a treat.

His elaborate plan -- which involves a commando team more extensive than the one that took out the terrorists in the Japanese Embassy in Peru -- involves not merely shaking down the kids' parents and annoying the FBI, all of this without actually killing anybody, but also tunneling through a hundred feet of concrete to get to the L.A. sewer system.

He has all the grown-ups buffaloed; they stand around with long faces, flummoxed at every turn. But there is a 16-year-old up to the challenge -- one Ozzie Paxton (Vincent Kartheiser), attitude king, high school dropout and computer genius. Although there's a lot of running around in tunnels and secret passageways and a few guns get fired, the real arena of battle is cyberspace, where the kid can engage his enemy on strength of sheer brainpower rather than force of weapon or muscle.

The director, Roger Christian, is a former set decorator, and as a piece of set decoration the movie is top-notch. If you go to movies for set decoration, you will have loads of fun. The walls are beautifully painted in a number of interesting shades, and the lighting is extremely well arranged. Golly, it's neat.

But in other small areas -- you know, credibility, drama, suspense, originality -- "Masterminds" appears to have been mounted by minimal minds whose only brilliant decision was in hiring Patrick Stewart.

Masterminds is rated PG-13 and contains intense scenes of children in danger.