REEL CRITICS:’Hot Rod’ can’t make jump to big screen; laughs missing

Once again, some bit players from “Saturday Night Live” try to stretch a lame 5-minute sketch into a full-length movie.

This time Andy Samberg is the starring idiot in this woeful attempt at big-screen humor.

His effort follows in the tiny comedy footsteps of low-level SNL alums like David Spade and Rob Schneider. This pitiful effort makes Will Ferrell look like a comic genius.

Samberg plays “Hot Rod” Kimble, the amateur stuntman of the title. He’s a wannabe Evel Knievel without any credentials.

He and his slacker pals join forces to give Hot Rod a chance jump over 15 school buses on a small motorcycle.

Together, they spend the entire movie beating an unfunny concept into a coma.

Sissy Spacek and Ian McShane should be embarrassed at playing even bit parts in this turkey.

It’s painful to watch actors begging for laughs that never come.

Most viewers would prefer being unconscious to sitting through this nonsense. Silly at its best and terminally stupid at every turn, “Hot Rod” is by far the worst mainstream film of the year.

‘Supremacy’ brings more action

Two movies this came out weekend that blew me away, for very different reasons.

“The Bourne Ultimatum” is the best action movie of the year.

The last and possibly best of the trilogy based on Robert Ludlum’s novels, it will get your pulse racing and your eyeballs set to explode.

Matt Damon returns as Jason Bourne, a man who’s almost no talk and all action. As a highly-trained CIA assassin with amnesia, he spent all of “The Bourne Identity” and “The Bourne Supremacy” finding out who he really is while being pursued by countless others.

In “Ultimatum,” he’s still trying to learn more of his past while being doggedly hunted down by new CIA boss Noah Vosen (David Straithairn) who seems to dislike Bourne almost as much as he scorns colleague Pamela Landy (Joan Allen).

Paul Greengrass’ direction, along with seamless editing and frenetic hand-held camera work, take you at breakneck speeds through the streets of Moscow, London, Paris, New York, Madrid and Tangier.

A brilliant chase sequence in Waterloo Station is so intense you’d think your own life was in peril. A demolition derby car chase rattles your bones and nerves alike.

Never mind who Bourne is or why everybody’s so desperate to kill him, or that he has more lives than a black cat. It’s all about the thrill of the chase.

The documentary “No End in Sight” should also get your blood pumping, but not in a good way It takes a hard, clear-eyed look at the Iraq war — not the reasons the United States got into it but how the situation got so out of hand.

Directed by Charles Ferguson, he interviewed many who were in President Bush’s administration who had first-hand experience in Iraq and knowledge of its infrastructure.

The facts revealed in this film, corroborated by journalists who were also on the scene, are shocking and infuriating.

Unfortunately, most of the people responsible for key decisions made about the occupation of Iraq declined to participate in the film, and you are left wanting to know more about it from their perspective.

But like any good film, we’re certainly given a lot of food for thought and discussion.

Also, it’s not often you see “personal bodyguards” listed in the film credits.