Pun Salad

No House, a World Series where neither team is named the "Red Sox", makes it movie night in Rollinsford, New Hampshire.

• To go along with the frenetic quick-cut MTV-style editing of this movie, I'll just do a bunch of bullet points.

• Bad guys want to kill the US President for (as near as I can tell) unspecified reasons. They're foreign, and I guess that's supposed to be reason enough.

• Once you think about the movie in retrospect, their insidious plot is unnecessarily complex. There's a mole in the Secret Service; how hard can it possibly be?

• Michael Douglas plays the hero, and he's really getting, well, up there, as are we all. What he needs in this movie is a young sidekick, someone he can repeatedly call 'buddy boy'.

• Kiefer Sutherland plays Jack Bauer, except there's a spot where he really could have and (arguably) should have shot someone in the thigh, but failed to do so. Plus which, his wife's alive.

• I personally don't see Michael Douglas canoodling with Kim Basinger. That strains credulity.

• So does Kim Basinger playing First Lady.

• For that matter, David Rasche playing the President?! I'm sorry, he'll always be Sledge Hammer to me. Who needs the Secret Service? Give him a gun, he'll take care of himself!

• And why did they shoot that first guy? If they explained that, I missed it. Did he know something? What? How did they know that he knew it? If it was so darn important, why didn't he tell someone, like, right away?

• At least I didn't fall asleep. That counts for something.