Though I have often been called a geek, it’s usually because I like computers and such.  I did collect comics when I was younger (okay, when I was older too), but not as much as some other people I knew.  I’ve always been more of a technical geek than a hidden-away-geek.  Not that there’s anything wrong with either.

As such, I’m generally on the periphery of most movies that have anything to do with comicdom.  I can typically keep up – while my wife would often run or walk the other way – and I can often enjoy them to at least some degree.  But in this case, I didn’t so much.  I liked the original Fantastic Four, and I’m aware enough of who the Silver Surfer was to be able to keep up, but I just didn’t really care for this sequel.

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Private First Class Franklin Fairchild Bean (Charlie Sheen) is ready to get out of the army. When he learns that his father dies, he’s had enough – though it’s never really explained just why he’s had enough. Perhaps he did it for his father, and now he’s ready to get out. We do see that he was forced to go into the military, or at least to military school, and perhaps now he’s ready to get out. In any case, he wants out and he wants out now.

It would seem that the prevailing knowledge at the time (this is in the sixties) is if you have “tattoos that show”, you will get kicked out. So Bean finds a tattoo artist that will do the work and gets a couple of 8 balls (the kind you play pool with) on the back of his hands – one on each. Then he gets drunk and gets thrown out of a bar window. Needless to say, his superiors aren’t happy. But it seems that he isn’t going to get out as easily as he had hoped, either.

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What starts off as a Christmas movie rapidly turns into something drastically different. A young boy and his father pull into a parking space outside a store, and the boy’s father tells him to stay in the car while he goes inside. Not long after, shots ring out and the father comes out, clutching cash in his hand, and then the boy sees his father killed when he is shot by the dying store owner. Then the boy vows to never do drugs or get involved in that kind of life.

Fast-forward twenty years to interviews in a police station, and we meet Russell Stevens, Jr. (Laurence Fishburne), all grown up and turned into a policeman, fighting the kind of thing that killed his father. Now he’s being given a deep cover job to live the kind of life that killed his old man. To do so, he’ll change his name to John Hull move to Los Angeles, get a shabby apartment and become a drug dealer to try and take down some of the most important pieces of an International operation. Getting involved isn’t difficult. Staying separate is.

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The acting in this drama was superb, especially from Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn. I find that as I watch more and more of Tim Robbins, I find that he has his characters nailed (he won an Oscar for his performance here) but they just don’t vary a whole lot. They always have the same off-kilter look, and they each make you wonder what is going on underneath the surface, but there just isn’t a lot of real depth. While I’m not the world’s largest fan of Sean Penn, I was impressed by his role here (he won too, deservedly so).

The thug-like character played by Penn is matched by Bacon’s police persona, and wouldn’t you know it? They knew each other as kids. As it turns out, Tim Robbins rounds at the trio as one of the friends who was abducted and abused one fine day while they were in the middle of some mischief making.

Penn’s character, Jimmy Markum, finds that his daughter is missing, and then that she is dead. Meanwhile, Bacon’s detective, Sean Devine claims the job of trying to figure out who did it – or at least find a reasonable suspect – before Markum uses his contacts to bring someone to justice.

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