But "Bait" makes a fatal mistake, one this kind of movie should never make unless it actually is "The Matrix" or "Terminator 2: Judgment Day": It's long. Long movies almost always mean the audience member has time to think, and in this context that's not a good thing. Thoughts and questions come into your mind: Why am I alive? And what am I doing here, watching this particular bad movie, when I could be reading "Remembrance of Things Past" or USA Today? Or watching "Moesha," which, if nothing else, lasts only 27 minutes?

Fast-talking, mock-debonair comic Jamie Foxx, longtime star of an eponymous WB show, is definitely the main attraction here. After his memorable performance as the cocksure young quarterback in Oliver Stone's "Any Given Sunday," Foxx joins forces with former commercial director Antoine Fuqua, who made 1998 actioner "The Replacement Killers." Their basic idea is to throw some contemporary flourishes into an old-school action movie in the Schwarzenegger-Stallone tradition: a little bit of slow-jam, sensitive-guy lovemakin', some free-form gags and a whole lot of ass kicking.

With his pencil-thin, sideburn-to-sideburn beard and his restless hustler's demeanor, Foxx is often hilarious as Alvin Sanders, an addlepated, low-rent criminal who's convinced he's a master playa. In the better parts of the movie, Foxx is clearly not on script: He's doing impressions of Al Pacino in "The Godfather Part II," riffing about escaping from prison with Harriet Tubman and Kunta Kinte and generally being charming, ultraconfident and supremely wrongheaded. Maybe Foxx isn't actually an actor, but for me his shtick has about twice the screen appeal of either Adam Sandler's or Martin Lawrence's.

While incarcerated on Riker's Island for stealing shrimp from a Brooklyn, N.Y., warehouse -- actually, as Alvin points out to anyone who'll listen, he was stealing prawns -- he winds up with a dying cellmate who has stashed $42 million in gold somewhere in New York. The dying prisoner stole the gold, in turn, from a psychopathic computer geek (Doug Hutchison, the weaselly prison guard in "The Green Mile") who masterminded a burglary of Manhattan's federal gold vault. He's another one of those soft-spoken villains, and Hutchinson delivers the year's second-best take on the not-quite-John Malkovich type (after Vincent D'Onofrio in "The Cell"). But how was such a smart guy swindled so easily? And why did he pick an accomplice with chronic heart disease? These are questions without answers.

Doing his usual likable-cuss act, David Morse (who was also in "The Green Mile") plays the gruff Treasury agent who has a bug implanted in Alvin's jaw and releases him from prison. The idea, as far as I can follow it, is that Alvin is a lure meant to attract our techno-DJ-looking geek villain and the T-men want geek-boy to realize that. They also want him to assume that Alvin knows where the gold is hidden, but Alvin doesn't. Or doesn't exactly. I think.

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