‘If it’s secret and elite, it can’t be good...’
It’s rare that you encounter a film in which every element is bad and yet it still manages to remain a mostly enjoyable experience overall. The old so-bad-it’s-good effect. Well, The Skulls is trash on every conceivable level. The cinematography is awful, the editing laughable, the soundtrack abysmal. And yet…
Luke McNamara (Joshua Jackson) needs some money in his bank account to continue his expensive law degree. He also pines over Chloe (Leslie Bibb), his friend and fellow student. After showing himself to be adept at boat racing, he is invited into a preposterous secret society called the Skulls. I say it’s secret, everyone knows where they meet because there is a massive skull atop their ostentatious building. Upon joining the society, he encounters Caleb Mandrake (Paul Walker), his nefarious father Litten (Craig T. Nelson) and their security guy Martin Lombard (Christopher McDonald).
You’ll notice that director Rob Cohen somehow managed to assemble a reasonably starry cast for this piece of shit, but the material is so bad that they pretty much universally struggle. Joshua Jackson is always a welcome presence in a supporting role, particularly if the character he is playing is basically just Joshua Jackson. Tasked with more to do here he flounders badly, not helped by a shoddy script and some baffling camera work. Walker is even worse, having made the perplexing decision to shout all of his lines in place of attempting to convey any kind of human emotion. Chris McDonald, coming off the back of an electric turn in Happy Gilmore, is criminally underused here, given absolutely nothing of interest to do. Indeed, only Nelson and particularly Leslie Bibb come out of this with any credit in the bank. As for Cohen, the director of such other early naughties masterpieces as The Fast and the Furious and xXx, he takes what is actually a fairly solid basic premise and drains it of all colour. Aside from the scenes inside the secret society, everything is shot in washed-out blues and greys, and while that was the style at the time, it has aged terribly. As has the bold choice to deliver a soundtrack that features both Papa Roach and Creed.
For those steeped in ’90s nostalgia, The Skulls is probably worth sitting through once if you’re at a particularly loose end, but make no bones about it, this is a truly execrable piece of work.