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According to a statement made in the opening scenes, the difference between a fraternity and a secret society is, one gets you for a few years, the other wants you for life (kind of like the difference between Girls Scouts and Baptists). Which makes frats look not so egregious compared to the group Luke McNamara (Joshua Jackson) falls in with. Starting his senior year at an unnamed university that's a very thinly disguised version of Yale, the scholarly working-class townie is sweating out how he's going to pay off his undergrad loans, much less pop for law school. But after a particularly gutsy performance leads his team to another rowing championship (this is Yale, after all, not I.T. Tech; he couldn't draw much attention to himself by winning the Intercollegiate Resin-Core Soldering League finals), Luke is drugged and kidnapped by the clandestine Skulls, a 200-year-old y-chromosome-only club of 322 members that every year inducts a few well-pedigreed graduating seniors (Yale has a society known as Skull and Bones, whose members include the senior George Bush; word is that W. either couldn't do enough sit-ups to get in, or misspelled "bones" on his application).
The Skulls have a lot of cultish rules and initiation procedures that go beyond trick handshakes, such as permanently marking new members with branding irons, locking each in a cage with his secret-Santa-Skull buddy to play "truth or dare" while the other watch, and making them sit through marathon "Matlock" reruns (okay, I made that part up), so Luke is about to decline until he learns that membership will also bring all the sex, money, power, and , specifically, free law-school tuition he can handle. How do they pay for it all? Easy -- most of the members are rich to begin with, and when they die a chunk of their estates goes back to the group. As for the power, those 322 include judges, politicians, law enforcement personnel, captains of industry, and maybe a Backstreet Boy or two (who fudged the y-chrome bit), so they can deliver on the promises. Luke opts in, gets the rulebook and the t-shirt, and next time he checks his ATM learns he's several decimal places richer.
It is a secret society though, so he can't tell his best friend Will (Hill Harper) or potential girlfriend Chloe (Leslie Bibb) where all the cash is coming from. Wouldn't you know it, Will is a journalism student working on an article about the society, and gets killed skul-king (heh, heh) around their massive on-campus fortress of solitude ("What's that?" "That's the student center." "What's that?" "That's the science building." "What's that?" "That's Skulls headquarters, where they have machine-gun towers and underground tunnels and separate blue and pink sidewalks for boys and girls and -- no, wait, that's Bob Jones University."). Luke has to help cover-up for his secret buddy (Paul Walker), who's the son of Mr. Skull himself (Craig T. Nelson), which makes him a pawn in the power struggle for control of the group. Ahh, but Luke still has some old ne'er-do-well car-thieving friends left over from his unrepentant townie days, and they all mount a big Mission: Impossible raid to set things right and keep him from getting, how you say, Skull-f****d. Events climax in a manner that would have made Aaron Burr proud. Or Raymond Burr, for that matter.
Pretty silly. It's not quite so bad as it sounds once you get drawn in, but The Skulls still makes Oliver Stone's conspiracies sound positively literate by comparison. Screenwriter John Pogue also did the extremely goofy Eraser and the less outlandish U. S. Marshals; this fits somewhere in the middle. As an example that kindred silly spirits find each other in Hollywood, director Rob Cohen was responsible for that incomprehensible martial-arts biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, and Dragonheart, where Sean Connery played a talking lizard. As always, it pays to read the fine print before you throw down for a ticket. C-
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