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'Fled': It's No Breakout

In "Fled," the new jailbreak picture starring Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Baldwin, director Kevin Hooks whips his audience through this tired parade of black-white buddy-movie cliches with a journeyman's pride in delivering the goods. It's hack work, and he knows it. But he approaches it with gusto and energy.

The plot is practically boilerplate: Two convicts -- one black, one white -- bust out of a Georgia penitentiary, chained together hand and foot. Basically, it's the same black-white confrontation setup as between Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in Stanley Kramer's "The Defiant Ones." In 1958, Kramer used this situation to explore race relations; in 1996, Hooks uses it for comedy. There's no more racial tension between the protagonists here than there is between the buddies in "Lethal Weapon." And without that edge, the relationship -- and the movie -- lack something essential. Instead of playing the race card, Hooks attempts to give the plot a contemporary twist by adding yet another cyber-cliche -- a hunt for a computer disk, this one containing vital information on the powerful Cuban Mafia.

Baldwin plays Dodge, a k a CyberThug, a cocky computer whiz kid doing 18 months for hacking into the mainframe of the telephone company. What the state prosecutors failed to notice, though, was that the hackmaster managed to make a few transactions while inside the big computer, the most important being the transfer of $25 million from a Cuban gangster (Michael Nader) currently under investigation by an ambitious district attorney (David Dukes).

But Dodge is in the dark, too. He doesn't know that the prison break was a rigged job, that he was supposed to escape with Piper (Fishburne), a former cop working undercover for the DA, and lead him to the disk.

Naturally, the Cuban don would like to get his hands on the disk, too, and dispatches his hit men (including one assassin who looks like Kevin Kline in really bad makeup) to kill him.

Much of the film takes place in Atlanta, but Hooks isn't one to bother with local atmosphere. Most of the film's Southern seasoning comes from Will Patton, who uses the role of police detective as an opportunity to try out his Andy of Mayberry impersonation. His drawl is so outrageous, and his timing so eccentric, that he seems wired up wrong. Still, Patton's performance is one of the few strokes of originality in a movie dedicated mostly to motorcycle chases and gunplay.

There are kicks here, but they're cheap, secondhand kicks. And the filmmaker pilfers so shamelessly from previous action hits that his characters are forced to acknowledge the thievery on screen.

"Didn't you see `The Fugitive'?" Baldwin asks as he and Fishburne come to a turning point after their escape. Later, Dodge refers to "The Godfather" and "Deliverance" and echoes Paul Newman in "Butch Cassidy."

On the whole, Baldwin seems pretty dim for a renowned cyber-anarchist. Also, he simply isn't in the same class of actor as Tony Curtis. Or Laurence Fishburne, who swaggers through this mess with his usual suave manliness. Fishburne has reached a point in his career where every move he makes is solid, strong, real. In his first major action role, he shows the potential to become a sort of black Lee Marvin. His presence here grounds the story and gives the movie some class, but it can't redeem it.

Fled is rated R for graphic violence, adult situations, nudity and extreme language.