Lawrence Fishburne and Stephen Baldwin Are Prisoners Of A Predictable Plot. By Stacey Richter THE TITLE IS Fled--you know, as in the past tense of flee--and the movie itself has all the awkward, stilted hipness of this funny little verb. And, like the title, the movie can be difficult to understand. (My friend thought we were seeing something named "Flood" until the opening credits, when she leaned over and said, "Oh! Fled!") What is Fled? Fled is your standard, ill-conceived, run-of-the-mill action flick where one buddy is black and the other is white, with a twist. The twist is this: The buddies don't really like each other, and they're chained together. Fled doesn't reach very high; as a consequence, its failures are rather mundane. Every now and then a more interesting flaw would seep through; something that disrupts the reflexive, by-the-numbers action plot. This is a movie peppered with little annoyances. Like, for one, Stephen Baldwin's haircut. Baldwin plays Dodge, a hacker who's been sentenced to 18 months in jail for violating the phone company's security system; at the start of the movie, he's been in jail for nine months. He and another prisoner, Piper (Lawrence Fishburne), get chained together as punishment and almost immediately wind up in the middle of a prison riot and run off--no, flee--into the woods. The funny thing is, through all this, Baldwin's hair looks great, because he doesn't have a prison haircut. He has a $120 L.A. haircut. I guess this is a trivial point, but it just seemed like no one was even making an effort. Since so much of the action in action movies is ridiculous, it seems like they should try to at least get the details right--it's the Star Trek principal of believability: Yes, its incredibly unlikely that every planet in the universe would have a breathable atmosphere, but we're willing to accept that as long as the characters live in a consistent world and we don't see Spock's ear tip fall off. Fled, though, does not do us the courtesy of creating a consistent world, and for some reason this bugged me more than all of its other faults combined. For example, at one point cute-guy Stephen Baldwin gets stripped and tortured by Cuban drug dealers. One of the Cuban drug dealers threatens, at first, to cut off his nipple, which is exciting--but then, what he does instead, is squeeze Baldwin's armpit. Really hard, I guess, because Baldwin contorts in agony. But...it just doesn't seem like that would really hurt all that much. At other times Baldwin seems quite tough; he lands a lot of punches, which doesn't really fit with his vocation of computer hacker. Though Baldwin is painted as essentially a techno nerd, we never learn why he's such a great fighter. We never see him do any impressive hacking either; all he does is get into a chat room with his buddy, which is something even my mother can do with a computer. (No, actually, I'm lying; she can't, but I'm sure she'll learn someday.) Fishburne manages to come off more smoothly than Baldwin does, not only because he's a more accomplished actor, but because his part is much better written. He is given hardly anything ridiculous to do (besides being chained to Dodge), and he manages to bluff his way through this movie with something very close to dignity. Baldwin is not so lucky. His character gets stuck doing the stupidest things. His girlfriend, for example, is a stripper, and after we get to watch him watching her and her colleagues perform for a while, Dodge gets into a fight with a fellow patron who is referring to the dancers as "hos" (as I believe the word is spelled; though some prefer "hoh"). Dodge promptly accuses the guy of being a sexist, who "doesn't like to see women in control." Please. Since when is an audience expected to watch gratuitous tit and ass shots, then listen to the characters argue about who's the bigger feminist? I suppose a scene like this could be funny, but director Kevin Hooks is too busy aiming for the middle of the target to let any campy humor filter in. If there's any life left in the one-buddy-is-black, one-buddy-is-white action movie-with-a-twist formula (which I doubt), it can only be as a parody. Fled comes dangerously close to unintentionally being this very parody. Fled is playing at El Dorado (745-6241) and Century Park (620-0750) cinemas.

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