'BAIT' HOOKS SOME HUMOR, BUT IT'S CONTRIVED.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

With ``Bait,'' Jamie Foxx fades back somewhat from his startlingly powerful dramatic work in ``Any Given Sunday.'' An overproduced action- comedy that isn't particularly bad but not in any way exceptional, the film neither gives Foxx much opportunity to break out comedically nor toplumb the serious chops he proved he had in Oliver Stone's football headbanger.

Foxx gives a likable, versatile enough performance here, but he's required to do too much running - and faces too much competition from director Antoine Fuqua's overcharged, empty stylistic flourishes - to have much left for the energized, inventive performance bits he's capable of.

The film's complicated, derivative script doesn't help matters much either. Sort of an ``Enemy of the State'' rehash run through a conceptual blender with assorted, interchangeable Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence movie formulas, ``Bait'' is your basic nice criminal stops real bad guy thing, tricked-out but not very well thought-out.

Foxx's Alvin Sanders is the pathetically petty thief who gets busted for stealing shrimp (``Prawns,'' he insists, like that somehow makes it manlier) the same night two high-tech burglars knock over the U.S. Treasury's Manhattan gold reserve - and leave two dead guards.

A falling out among the thieves leads to one of them making off with the whole $42 million in bullion and successfully stashing it before being busted. In a holding cell with Alvin, he imparts cryptic clues to the swag's whereabouts before having a heart attack. All of this mightily consternates the ruthless T-man Clenteen (David Morse), who wants both the goods and revenge for his murdered colleagues, in no particular order of preference.

This is all a setup. Eighteen months later, Alvin is unexpectedly released from prison. He doesn't know that Clenteen has engineered the whole thing, and has also implanted audio bugs and satellite tracking devices in his jaw. Following Alvin's every movement and word from a control room that looks like a leftover ``Men in Black'' set, the feds figure that the unknown, super computer whiz behind the gold heist will come after Alvin, too. They're right; but the evil genius Bristol (``Green Mile'' weasel Doug Hutchison, who here steals every mannerism there is to take from John Malkovich) has a way of using the government's own technology against it.

Then, of course, there's the wild card behavior of Alvin to contend with. Trouble is, it's not wild enough. Though unsuspecting and, by Clenteen's reckoning, expendable, the recidivistically inclined Alvin is primarily interested in salvaging his pre-prison relationship with Lisa (Kimberly Elise) and being a good father to the baby boy he didn't know they had. Sure, he has a few schemes going, and the feds' increasingly desperate efforts to keep Alvin out of trouble until Bristol bites are mildly amusing, but overall, the guy's rapidly expanding sense of responsibility squelches the potential for gut-busting laughs.

Likewise, the whole constant surveillance angle's comic possibilities get trampled in the film's headlong rush toward contrived action climaxes. The workaholic eavesdroppers get a little turned-on when Alvin and Lisa finally, um, reconcile, but not much is done with the concept beyond that obvious gag.

For all his music video flashmastering, Fuqua does keep the convoluted storytelling as clear as it can get and moves things along at a brisk pace. That's good in some ways, but ``Bait'' probably would have been better with a little less plotting and more leisure time for Foxx and his friends to really develop memorable moments.

``BAIT''

(Rated R; violence, language, drug use, sex).

The stars: Jamie Foxx, David Morse, Doug Hutchison, Kimberly Elise, Mike Epps. Behind the scenes: Directed by Antoine Fuqua. Written by Andrew Scheinman, Adam Scheinman and Tony Gilroy. Produced by Sean Ryerson. Released by Warner Bros. Running time: One hour, 57 minutes. Playing: Citywide. Our rating: Two and one half stars.

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Photo:

David Morse, right, is a U.S. Treasury investigator who intimidates Jamie Foxx into becoming human bait.