Fled's got the whole action-movie formula down pat: The explosions, fights, Mafia thugs, good cops versus bad cops, feds versus good ol' country boy cops, convicts on the run, romance and that good feeling you get from two grown men running around shooting guns, punching each other and eventually becoming buddies. Sounds like the good old-fashioned edge-of-your-seat summer flick, right? The problem is this sort of movie has been done and done and overdone with better actors, more original plots and more interesting characters.

In director Kevin (Passenger 57) Hooks' off-shoot of the 1958 film, The Defiant Ones, Fishburne pegs the sensitive, astute character he's so apt to play (e.g. Boys in The Hood). This sickeningly sappy character, Piper, is an ex-New York narcotics agent now in the joint. The U.S. Attorney General stages a set-up ruckus on the chain gang of the prison and hires Piper to get fellow inmate Dodge (Stephen Baldwin) to run. Seems both the Attorney General and the Cuban Mafia want Dodge because they all want to get their hands on a mysterious computer disk. (Thank God for the computer age, an ever-replenishing resource for boring plots.)

Piper literally drags Dodge around, constantly piping, "Come on, Convict. We gotta fled." Meanwhile, idiot boy incessantly nags Piper about what happened in similar movies he's seen. "Haven't you ever seen The Fugitive?" And that's the real kicker--Fled is a sampler of other action movies, each element reminiscent of some bigger and better movie. It's a little like a Die Hard movie, but there's nothing hard about it; actually, Fled's a lot more like the Kurt Russell, Sylvester Stallone bomb Tango and Cash (if you even can, or care to, remember that one). The Fishburne-Baldwin team has been called the best since Lethal Weapon, but there sure ain't nothin' lethal about it. I'd say the Baldwin kid was better as Pauly Shore's sidekick.

The only original scene in the movie comes from a much built-up chase scene where Piper and Dodge flee the Mafia guys on Ducati motorcycles. Dodge makes such an embarrassingly big deal about these little Italian bikes, rambling on about how they go up to 185 mph and so on, that I actually began to wonder how much the big boys at Ducati bikes were involved in the production. I felt like I was sitting in the first of a breed of cinemercials--a two hour infomercial using two big actors and a bunch of elements from good movies to sell these bikes. But I do have to say the chase scene on those little hummers was pretty cool. Too bad it didn't last longer.

Throughout the movie, the action is tedious, explosions are minimal, and sex is ... well, there is none. (Hey, what's an action movie without sex?) From the beginning, we're built up for the great and glorious good-feeling punchline--the only funny part of the movie, when some goon in the back of the theater mimicked Piper in the climatic struggle scene, yelling, "Time to pay the Piper!"

If you're a big fan of "In the Heat of the Night" (you know, that TV drama about Southern cops with Archie Bunker and a guy named Bubba) and you'd much rather stay home and catch a made-for-TV movie than go to the theater, then you might really dig Fled. But I doubt it. If you want to laugh your ass off at some particularly shallow and lame characters (like Dodge's girlfriend who strips at a nightclub because she has "to pay tuition" and the good ol' boy cop who speaks with a forced Southern drawl and acts far too backwoods for even a Georgia cop), you might catch the matinee. Better yet, save your money, wait until it does come on TV.