'Skulls' explores the oh-so-dangerous world of Yale's secret societies

When new members enter the secret society that gives "The Skulls" its name, the society's insignia is branded onto their wrists with a red-hot iron. The pain disappears immediately, however, when the telltale burn mark is covered with the cool metal of a fancy Breitling wrist watch.

This improbable scene provides an apt metaphor for the film itself. Director Rob Cohen truly seems to believe that lavish measures of mystique can conceal the boilerplate plot outline and excruciating dialogue that denote the membership of "The Skulls" in the society of bad movies.

Sometimes, though certainly not often enough, Cohen is right. The movie's opening scene is one of its best, a paean to the uniquely collegiate fervor of varsity rowing. After foreshadowing the creaky machinery of his storyline with a closeup on the gears and flywheels of an old-style ergometer, Cohen takes his camera out on the water. With a variety of camera angles and a long sweep over the shimmering river, Cohen puts real vitality into an Ivy League boat race that features a Princeton team duly decked out in black and orange.

The movie does well not to disguise its Ivy League milieu. Its mission is to expose Yale University's Skull and Bones society, and though Yale is never named, the movie is set in New Haven, athletes are called "Bulldogs," and giant Ys are ubiquitous. If the Skull and Bones society were really as powerful and really as goony as the movie suggests, "The Skulls" would never have been made.

Nevertheless, Skull and Bones is real. Lodged in a windowless sandstone mausoleum on the Yale campus, the society was founded in 1832 by William H. Russell, the valedictorian of his graduating class. Members over the years have included William Howard Taft, three generations of the Bush family and conservative pundit William F. Buckley, who purportedly once stood in the mausoleum's doorway to block the court-ordered admission of women into the society.

In the movie, the Skulls claim to be coed, but nary a woman member is seen — and good thing, too. The perks of membership are an adolescent boy's fantasy: classic sports cars and complimentary call girls. A large percentage of the movie's universally unfavorable reviews seems to take sulky umbrage at the society's outlandish rituals and crass materialism.

This sort of response is unfortunate, because the portrayal of the Skulls is likely not too far off the mark. And even if it is, there are a host of things in the movie more deserving of derision than its premise — primarily, its characters.

As in most barely salvageable movies, the characters are weaker than the situation they are written into. New Skull Lucas McNamara (Joshua Jackson from "Dawson's Creek") is a townie who has been saved from a no-account life in the New Haven sewers by hard work and pathos. Luke never knew his father, and his mother died when he was "too young to remember her face."

Consequently, Luke's greatest fear is being alone, and the screenwriters apparently share this fear — three burnouts from Luke's childhood are so desperate to introduce themselves into the plot that they try to run their old friend over in a stolen car. These misfits will become important later, of course, when they break into the Skulls' super-secret headquarters and proceed to outsmart and outmaneuver the world's savviest and most aggressively self-protecting power brokers.

Luke's foil is a rakish WASP named Caleb Mandrake (Paul Walker), "a Skull since the day he was born" — born, that is, into a family where men named Litten have sons named Caleb. Father Litten Mandrake ("Coach" Craig T. Nelson) is the chairman of the Skulls' leadership council and moonlights as a conniving judge, angling for a Supreme Court appointment. Litten is antagonized by fellow councilman and Virginia Senator Ames Levritt (William Petersen), who claims to identify with Luke's hardscrabble youth despite a genteel Southern accent and a name like Ames Levritt.

As the movie progresses, dialogue takes the place of acting ("There seems to be some tension between your father and the Senator, Caleb"), and all the Oedipal, fraternal, sexual and professional anxieties puddle together. In all this mess, the movie's most hilarious absurdity is that the Skulls' chief thug and boogeyman is no less conspicuous a figure than the Yale University provost.

In the end, Luke rejects the society, but a vague sense persists that he is already in too deep. The camera shows him alone on the water, rowing, cleverly, in a single scull. The audience can sympathize with his plight — just as Luke has removed his Breitling, the audience can stop watching. In either case, however, the burn remains.