Just perfect...

There are women in the film, but none has anything you could call a personality.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I have to agree with most of the other posts. Was it a comedy? a drama? to me it leaned a little to much towards the comedy side. I could have been a great movie without the comedy and it was horribly contrived. Jamie keeps running into the Julio and whats his name. In New York, how many times do you run into someone you know in downtown Cleveland.And just how could Robert Pastorelli dig up Yankee Stadium to hide the gold. Again, a comedy or drama? But it was still entertaining especially for a Sunday morning. I enjoyed Kimberly Elise's performance, she certainly a beautiful actress and seems to take her craft seriously. She is a younger actress that is going to be viable.

Are you familiar with concept of children's artwork? While it is not the greatest Picasso any three-year-old has ever accomplished with their fingers, you encourage them to do more. If painting is what makes them happy, there should be no reason a parent should hold that back on a child. Typically, if a child loves to paint or draw, you will immediately see the groundwork of their future style. You will begin to see their true form in these very primitive doodles. Well, this concept of children's artwork is how I felt about Fuqua's depressingly cheap and uncreative film Bait. While on all accounts it was a horrid film, it was impressive to see Fuqua's style begin emerging through even the messiest of moments. If you have seen either Training Day or King Arthur, you will be impressed with the birth of this director in his second film Bait. While Foxx gives a horrid, unchained performance, there are certain scenes, which define Fuqua and demonstrate his brilliance behind the camera. Sadly it only emerged in the final thirty minutes of the film, but if you focus just on those scenes, you will see why Fuqua's name appears on so many "Best Of…" film lists.I will never disagree with someone that Fuqua's eye behind the camera is refreshing and unique. His ability to place a camera in the strangest of places to convey the simplest of emotions is shocking. I am surprised that more of Hollywood hasn't jumped aboard this bandwagon. Even in the silly feature Bait, you are witness to Fuqua's greatness. Two scenes that come directly to mind are the explosion scene near the middle of the film and the horse scene close to the end. In both of these scenes I saw the director Fuqua at work. Alas, in the rest of this film, all I saw was a combination of nearly every action film created. The likable hero down on his luck that suddenly finds his life turned around by some unknown force is a classic structure that just needs to die in Hollywood. We have seen this two often, and no matter who you are (unless you are Charlie Kaufmann), you cannot recreate the wheel. It is just impossible with this genre, and it is proved with Bait. I was annoyed with Fuqua for just sitting back and allowing this to happen, which could explain why it took me three viewings to finish this film. I was just tired of the structure, and while I hoped that Fuqua would redefine it, he did not.Then, there was the acting. While Jamie Foxx has never impressed me as an actor, I was willing to give this helmed vehicle a try. I wanted to see if he could pull off another dramatic role similar to Collateral. I was under the impression that perhaps this was the film chosen to show producers that Foxx could handle the role in Collateral. Again, I was disappointed. Foxx was annoying. Not in the sense that it was the way that his character was to be, but in the sense that it felt as if neither Fuqua nor Foxx took the time to fully train Foxx on what should be ad-libed and what should be used to further the plot. Instead, we are downtrodden with scene over scene of Foxx just trying to make the audience laugh. Adding second long quips and culture statements just to keep his audience understanding that he was a comedian first, an actor second. Fuqua should have stopped this immediately. Foxx's jokes destroyed his character, which in turn left me with nothing solid to grasp ahold of. Instead of character development, he would crack a joke. Neither style worked, no joke was funny. The rest of the cast was average. By this I mean I have seen them all in similar roles. They were brining nothing new to the table, nothing solid to the story, and nothing substantial to the overall themes of the film. They were pawns filling in dead air space. Fuqua had no control over this mess, and the final verdict only supports that accusation.Overall, this was a sad film. With no creativity in sight and unmanaged actors just trying to upstage themselves, what originally started as a decent story eventually sunk faster into the cinematic quicksand. Foxx was annoying, without character lines, and a complete bag of cheese. In each scene I saw no emotion, and when emotion was needed to convey a message, he chose to take his shirt off rather than tackle the issues. Are my words harsh? I don't think so. When you watch any movie you want to see some creativity, some edible characters, and themes that seem to hit close to home. Bait contained none of these. While I will give Fuqua some credit for two of the scenes in this film, the remaining five hundred were disastrous. Apparently, I took the bait when renting this film, but now having seen it, hopefully I can stop others from taking that curious nibble.Grade: ** out of ***** (for his two scenes that were fun to watch)

The film was.. decent. It's Enemy of The State meets Seven, basically. A lot of high tech gov't gadgets.. Think of it as Kevin Spacey'scharacter in Seven, with Gene Hackman's NSA knowledge from Enemy of the State..Hutchison did an excellent job imitating Spacey's John Doe character.. right down to the expressions & movements.. I wonder how many times he had to watch that movie, to get it just right..It's too bad he didn't bring something original to the character though.. If I wanted to watch Seven.. Id watch Seven.Jamie Foxx was hilarious though.. he needs to do MORE films.. he's someone you could never tire of..David Morse also did a great job.. he plays a dick, just as well as a good guy.. we need to see more of him in movies too.The movie itself.. kinda drawn out, but tolerable.

BAIT (2000) * Jamie Foxx, David Morse, Doug Hutchison, Kimberly Elise, David Paymer, Mike Epps, Nestor Serrano, Jamie Kennedy, Robert Pastorelli. (Dir: Antoine Fuqua)Jamie Foxx is on a crest of superstardom but wipes out here in this incredibly derivative and unoriginal action comedy that supersedes his talent and an audience's endurance.Foxx plays petty criminal Alvin Sanders, a fast-talking loser who winds up in deep trouble when he's busted for an ill-conceived prawn heist (that's right, a prawn heist) - so bad that he keeps explaining the difference from regular shrimp) and thrown into jail with another would-be thief named Jaster (Pastorelli) who was part of a two-man operation to rob the Federal Reserve of $42 million in gold bars when his sociopathic partner, Bristol (Hutchison doing a mean John Malkovich) , who offed the two security guards and wound up without their treasure. Only Jaster knows, or so it seems, and his heart condition only makes matters worse when he croaks during his interrogation by hard-on Treasury Agent Clenteen (Morse, completely wasted of his talent here) who then assumes Sanders might have some knowledge since he rationalizes they were cell mates for eight hours.When he gets nothing from Sanders, Clenteen sees to it he gets his prison sentence and flash forward 18 months later with Sanders being released as part of an intricately planned maneuver by the still relentless Clenteen which involves implanting a microchip transmitter in Sanders' jaw (don't ask) whereby he can trace every move the ex-con will make (naturally in the path of the inevitable gold; smart huh?) Sanders hooks up with his crime loving brother (Epps) and reunites with his girl (Elise) who is skeptical and has Sanders' baby to prove he better be talking the talk and going straight. What follows is just another pedestrian script of letting some throwaway one-liners by Foxx and the usual pyrotechniques by the film's ridiculous climax involving Bristol menacing his family and an elaborate set up at a race track. Foxx squanders his natural talent here and needs to re-focus his film path (he was great in his semi-dramatic turn in `Any Given Sunday' last year) and continue re-fining his comic skills on his tv series. The film is an embarrassment to himself and to his fans.