Ordinary Decent Criminal (2000, UK release)

In this second feature about the Irish gangster Martin Cahill, Kevin Spacey plays a thinly fictionalized Belfast crook who’s so impressed with his own thieving ways, the man’s smirk and ego overtake his abilities. Or maybe I mean Kevin Spacey the actor falls into this trap. It’s hard to tell as his Irish accent bounces and goes so much it could make a man puke his Lucky Charms. Spacey is coasting in a film made in 1998, but unseen in ’Merica until 2003. With reason. He plays “Michael Lynch” (that is, Cahill of “The General”) a gang leader with two wives (who are sisters), a bundle of children, and a talent for eluding prison as he robs banks, dole offices, and –- in a scene that shits on fact -– an art museum. Director Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s story is so vacant of any danger it makes a crime all its own. But Spacey –- filmed before “American Beauty” -- smirks self-satisfied. His worst gig. Colin Farrell appears, pre-stardom. Sorry, Colin. C-

The Rundown (2003)

It comes fast, a split-second cameo: Arnold Schwarzenegger walks out of a bar and yells, “Have fun!,” as Dwayne Johnson -– billed as “The Rock” for his wrestling -– struts into a showdown that will have him clobbering most of a football team. Off the bat, director Peter Berg in his second film is planting flags: Johnson is the new Action King and “The Rundown” is a goofy, bone-cruncher flick from 1986. And it is exactly that. Every beat, stunt, gag, and boom is wired to the days of Reagan. Irritation? Yes. Likely the point? Fact. Plot: Johnson is Beck, a bounty hunter sent to the Amazon to retrieve the son (Sean William Scott) of his loan shark boss. In the jungle, his target easily found, Beck gets sucked into a third-world slave camp (free market capitalism!) drama run by an evil baron (Christopher Walken). Skulls crack, you know the rest. Johnson’s charisma is strong as Berg dreams up cackling, chortling myriad ways to put his hero through the ringer. Scott’s Wile E. Coyote irritates and needles Beck in the film’s best unsaid gag: This is a bromance take on “Romancing the Stone,” one of those great ’80s films. B

The Recruit (2003)

When a brilliant hotshot (Colin Farrell) is recruited to join the CIA and his trainer/boss/mentor looks and sounds and does that whole wiggy Al Pacino thing, and is, in fact, Al Pacino, something must be wrong. “I got a bad feeling about this” wrong. And, that’s “The Recruit,” a spy thriller from Roger Donaldson, who made the terrific 1980s mind-screw “No Way Out.” You know the way out here, though, because … did I mention Al Pacino? In a literal spotlight at one point? Sporting a goatee? This is by-the-numbers with every twist underlined by a loud music cue, but it’s not a terrible affair. Pacino overacts with zeal, having fun showing the whipper snappers on set (Farrell, Bridget Moynahan) how you spook the guys behind the cameras and holding the boom mikes. Drinking while watching? Take a shot every time Farrell loses the American accent. And, yes, I skipped a plot summary. (Al Pacino.) C+

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

I watched “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” twice in one week to truly understand how much of an empty-headed, empty-hearted letdown it is, a dull gray shadow of its first outing, “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” one of the most fun Big Hollywood Tent Pole Movies of 2003 and the past decade.

That was a deserved Hollywood blockbuster: The thrill of seeing undead men walking on the ocean floor in moonlight to take a ship, Geoffrey Rush’s gleefully nasty villain who, I swear, I wanted to win because he was so … rotten good, Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, a swashbuckling conman hero with eye-liner who took part in the action yet remained aloof, a comedic Puck-like character from Shakespeare. With an undying thirst for rum, rum, rum. And rum. It was as if Depp said, “You want me to headline a Hollywood summer film? Alright, stand back.” The cast and characters (including Orlando Bloom and then-unknown Keira Knightley as the hero and damsel in distress) seemingly had no idea how to contemplate the actor Depp or the character Jack, and in once hilarious scene Bloom all but breaks the fourth wall to make sport of Sparrow/Depp.

“Black Pearl” was and remains a fun blast. No one knew it would work. It did. Massively. (Rush was robbed of a Best Supporting Actor nomination, fact.) The film remains endlessly rewatchable, just to pick out the shifts and squirms in Depp and his pirate self. The inevitable sequels disappointed, they had nowhere to go but down, but they limped along nicely enough. This? This fourth sequel? Third sequel? Shit, does it matter? No. I have thus far avoided talking about it have you not noticed? It hurts my cinematic brain.

Depp is back, and the center stage as Jack Sparrow, the first mistake in this Rob Marshall-directed (he made “Chicago” and “Nine”) crapper that has no spark, no center, or soul, or logic. (Gore Verbinski helmed the first three.) Even hair-brained Hollywood logic, by which I mean the “Don’t think, enjoy” mantra is gone. Depp looks deeply sullen and uninterested from the start as he badly impersonates a London judge then – must I explain? – gets mixed in with a former flame (Penelope Cruz) and the nastiest pirate of all, Blackbeard (Ian McShane). It is McShane who gives some pulse to this mess, which leaves Bloom and Knightley behind for another couple two boring to speak about, and I say that knowing the dude plays a Christian missionary and the lady plays a genuine mermaid. How that can be boring, I’ll never know, but the writers behind this film make it so.

The whole darn lot is after the Fountain of Youth, and the climatic fight over it – involving pirates, Brits, the Spanish navy, those mermaids and zombies, yes, zombies – plays like an AARP promo. Arthritic, with bad-lighting, and lots of mugging. I mean sorry-ass smiles, not robbery, unless one counts the price of a movie ticket or DVD. The filmmakers whip up so many switcheroos that the endless double crosses become redundant echoes of “Gotch’ya!” In one ugly spot, Sparrow pulls a mutiny prank that gets an innocent man executed (by flamethrower!) at the hands of Blackbeard. Sparrow just shrugs it off. The scene is all kinds of wrong, bad for Jack and the series.

No scene is more boring and overlong than an early sword fight between Depp and Cruz, shot in pitch dark and from angles so unpleasant and haphazard, even a child would know we are watching stunt doubles piss about in a second-unit action scene. The once-rousing “Pirates” music by Klaus Badelt, Depp’s comedic timing, and the way he once slipped in and out of the action like an armed drunken court jester, is all off, as is the supernatural kitsch. We get zombie pirates, massive ships (the Black Pearl!) shrunken and captured in rum bottles, and voodoo magic. None of it is explained, and all of it reeks like half-assed script ideas abandoned whilst cameras rolled.

Rush returns (again!) as Barbossa, but that joyously evil glimmer he showed in “Black Pearl” is gone. Rush is here for the paycheck and the vacation in Central America, same as Depp. Having seen Depp slump through “Rum Diary,” I’m not too shocked, but Rush is usually above that. The first film played like a wild card gag, while “Stranger” lacks strangeness and magic, it is a lifeless bore, so dark (and in useless 3-D) I thought the big-screen TV we recently purchased was off kilter.

A fifth (!) “Pirates” is in the works, but I hope it’s a chest never opened. Beyond McShane and employing hundreds of CGI geeks and model makers, this third sequel (that hurts typing that again) has no reason to exist other than to have made hordes of money. (Which it sadly did.) Jump the shark? Jump off the plank. Captain Jack should quit the sea, and retire. To the ocean floor. Black Pearl: A On Stranger Tides: C-

Paycheck (2003)

The joke is too easy. Why did Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman and Aaron Eckhart star in “Paycheck”? The money! (Crickets.) Based on a Philip K. Dick story, the plot follows Michael Jennings (Affleck), a square-jawed square who hires out his engineering skills to shady corporations. His job: Steal technology, reverse engineer it, and hand the results over. Upon payment, his memory is wiped. At a party, a mega-billionaire fiend (Eckhart) offers Michael a huge payday if he’ll give up three years to work on a secret project. Mike takes the job. He is told nothing will go wrong. Thurmon is the love interest who helps memory-wiped Michael after everything goes bad. John Woo directs with every cliché in his bag of tricks: Crossed guns, slow-mo birds and chase scenes that won’t quit. The three leads have zero spark, so maybe they did sign on for the cash. Only Paul Giamatti and Colm Feore have any presence. The plot is preposterous even for bad sci-fi. Ironically, “Paycheck” wipes from memory at film's end. C-

Finding Nemo (2003)

Pixar’s underwater adventure film “Finding Nemo” is another pearl in the studio’s collection. Here, a father clown fish (Albert Brooks in splendid Defcon 4 Meltdown) searches the Pacific Ocean for his only child, Nemo, who has been taken by an underwater diver. The captured boy fish is kept in a tank and befriends other sea creatures, quickly growing up away from his father’s helicopter parenting ways. Well, OK, so the plot riffs close to “An American Tail.” This is far better. “Nemo” has a pack of sharks forming a vegan support group, Ellen DeGeneres as a fish with a “Memento” problem, and a visual concept so marvelous, it’s a treat just to watch. The textures of the fish skins change in and out of water, and as they float, the body’s weight and fins are flawlessly rendered. I also dig Alexander Gould as Nemo, a scared boy with a damaged fin. In perfect child sync, Gould trips over many of his lines, barely able to get the words in order. In Pixar fashion, story and character still top the effects. Magical. A

American Splendor (2003)

If Tom Waits was a nerd who never got around to playing music and opted to write comic books instead, he would have been America’s much-needed Harvey Pekar before Harvey Pekar ever filled the vacant position. Thank God that Waits is God and became a musician, correction, the musician, and Harvey – who died last week at 70 as I write this – turned his life into a comic book.

See, Pekar turned an art form dedicated to super heroes and monsters on its ass, and then stuck his thumb up it. His basic rule: Saving the world? Fuck it. Hell, living in it is difficult enough. He had artists such as R. Crumb to fill in the art work. This brilliant fourth-wall cracking 2003 adaptation celebrates this genius-oddball-file clerk by breaking down the rules of film, it’s at once a straight-forward biopic with Paul Giamatti as Pekar and Hope Davis as his third wife, Joyce, and a documentary featuring interviews of the real people on stages, and an interactive comic book come to life. There’s even a scene where the Giamatti and Davis as Mr. and Mrs. Pekar watch a play with actors (Donal Logue and Molly Shannon) playing a scene we just witnessed. No film has ever been made like this, them or since.

By celebrating Pekar, directors and writers Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini celebrate the best intention of this whacked, sinful, exuberant land we call America: That anyone can rise above the muck. Even briefly. You just have to have the will. And the luck. Or the bad bad luck that others find inspiring, in a twisted way. American Splendor, indeed. Oh, best first date ever committed to film. Hands down. Giamatti is a genius here, getting Harvey's mannerisms down cold. My favorite film of 2003. Giamatti should have capped an Oscar. The film, too. A

The Core (2003)

“The Core” is an End of the World Thriller that had me screaming “Burn, baby, burn!” Every minute in this John Amiel-directed film is a bust, making the similar but thoroughly watchable “2012” seem like high art. The film’s most mind-numbing scene has the sun’s microwave heat melting the entire San Francisco Bay Bridge, but only giving the living motorists below sunburn. But that’s just bad science, and this is the place of miracles. Case in point: Aaron Eckhart is made haggard, dull and whiny, while every bit of intelligence that embodies Hilary Swank is erased. Stanley Tucci fares worse as the egomaniac physicist whose shadiness is best demonstrated by his wet-noodle wrist. (Homophobic? You bet.) The badness of the scenes where our heroes endlessly bicker like spoiled children are bottomed only by the ones in which they mourn and weep over one another, but truly appear like they could give a crap. At one point Tucci’s doomed academic sighs, “What the fuck am I doing?” I imagine it’s a phrase the cast often spoke. D-