Held Up

If you can say one thing in Held Up's favor, it's that the film isn't the horrendous atrocity you'd expect it to be. Jamie Foxx, who took a turn toward three-dimensional characters in Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday, isn't horrible; futhermore, he's even beginning to show that he has evolved beyond the lame comedy of his WB sitcom. Unfortunately, this film, which was presumably shot prior to Any Given Sunday, doesn't give him much to work with, and isn't funny, although there are numerous moments in it that ought to be. The setup is the classic "guy having a bad day" template: when Jamie's girlfriend (Nia Long) realizes that he spent their nest egg on a classic car, she bails on him. Before long the car is stolen, and Jamie finds himself in the midst of a hold-up, one of several wacky hostages who grow to love the incompetent Latino criminal with the gun more than the inept local hick cops -- one of whom is played by Jake Busey -- who instantly go into siege mode. No doubt pitched as Clerks meets The Negotiator, Held Up is neither tense enough nor funny enough to merit the creation of such a hybrid. The inevitable jokes based on the premise that every black man looks alike to small-town whites are mildly amusing, especially when a young boy thinks Foxx is Puff Daddy (even more amusing if you know that Foxx actually replaced Puffy in Any Given Sunday). If you're going to tweak stereotypes, however, don't make all the Latino characters either fruit salesmen or idiot criminals! The story's quirky, and everyone's relatively likable, but that isn't enough: Comedies require laughs, and there are none to be found in these parts.