Grade: D-

The marketing folk at DreamWorks want you to believe that “Biker Boyz” is a version of “The Fast and the Furious” on two wheels, but the comparison is totally misleading. That Vin Diesel vehicle was an empty exercise in testosterone, but it at least possessed a certain manic energy and visual verve that (along with the lovingly photographed souped-up cars) made the young male audience salivate. By contrast Reggie Rock Bythewood’s picture, although it’s based on a newspaper story, is basically a slow, lazy soap opera that just happens to be set in the world of California bike gangs. To be sure, it features a few races, but they’re mostly brief, badly photographed and surprisingly unexciting. “Boyz” instead concentrates on the tortured maturation of a troubled teen who must come to terms with the truth about his family’s past. Neither Vin nor his fans will know what to make of it–not that many of them will choose to try.

The protagonist of the flick is a teen called Kid (Derek Luke), who watches his father Willie (an unbilled Eriq La Salle) accidentally killed in a street race won by Smoke (Laurence Fishburne), president of the Black Knights gang and the recognized “King of Cali,” whose bike Willie has tenderly maintained for years. Skipping ahead a bit, Kid returns to the gang anxious to challenge Smoke; ultimately he forms his own titular band of misfits as a means of doing so. Others intervene, most notably Kid’s mother who, as it turns out, has a deep, dark secret relating to her pre-marital connection with Smoke. One doesn’t want to spill the beans, but it’s safe to say that almost everyone who sees the movie and knows Derek Luke’s name will be thinking of a line from “The Empire Strikes Back” (and chuckling) at a climactic moment.

Bythewood tells this lachrymose story, devised by Craig Fernandez from an article on LA gangs by Michael Gougis, with a remarkable degree of lassitude. Most of the intimate scenes plod mercilessly, shapeless and distended. One might imagine that the racing action would compensate, but it doesn’t: those scenes seem perfunctory at best, and the curious effect showing the “tunnel vision” Smoke adopts in psyching himself at the starting-line is a bad idea, endlessly repeated. The acting is poor, too. Fishburne is a capable guy, but here he does one of those Great Stone Face imitations intended to exude strength but instead suggesting boredom. Luke, who had an impressive debut in “Antwone Fisher,” does a slovenly, aimless turn–merely the sophomore jinx, one hopes. A wide variety of other good performers–Orlando Jones, Djimon Hounsou, Larenz Tate–are wasted in stock roles. Brendan Fehr (late of “Roswell”) at least shows some personality, even if of an irritating kind, as Kid’s best buddy; the same certainly can’t be said of Kid Rock, who demonstrates no discernible thespian ability as Dog, the leader of a rival bike gang called the Strays. Even technically the picture disappoints; it’s shot in dark, gloomy tones that merely accentuate the moroseness of the plot, and the music score is predictably loud and nasty.

If you want to see a good picture about cycle gangs, check out the Marlon Brando classic “The Wild One.” It may date back to 1954, but it still has a punch this tedious entry lacks. “Biker Boyz” is one of those misguided projects that start out badly and cross the finish line (where the picture literally ends) in even worse shape.

Grade: C

Some years ago drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs (aka John Bloom) established the fundamental rule for successful sequels–make the same movie over again!–and the hands behind “Final Destination 2” have observed his injunction virtually to the letter. The cast may have changed (hardly surprising since so many of the principals were killed off in the initial installment, and this isn’t a ghost story), but in terms of premise, plot and construction, this is pretty much a replay of its 2000 predecessor.

In this case, though, that’s not a bad thing. The original “Final Destination” was, shall we say, a cut above the usual run of teen slasher movies. It was basically about young people dying untimely deaths, but like “A Nightmare on Elm Street” years earlier, it had a reasonably clever explanation for the raft of corpses, and it featured some amusingly complicated modes of demise. To be sure the picture ran out of gas toward the end of the journey, but for the most part it offered a better-than-average ride as far as this genre goes.

“FD1” concerned a bunch of kids who “escaped” death after one of them had a premonition that led them all to get off a doomed airplane at the last minute. But as it turned out, it’s not nice to fool the Grim Reaper, and an invisible force that might be called Fate or Destiny tracked down the survivors to balance the accounts through a succession of amusingly complicated “accidents.” This time around, the victims-to-be are a group of people, of various ages this time, who avoid a horrendous car crash as a result of the foreboding of a prescient girl named Kim (A.J. Cook). Before long, she and all the other “escapees” are being stalked and eliminated; the effort to save as many as possible also involves a stalwart cop (Michael Landes) who rescues Kim when Death first arrives to claim her and gets all the marked persons together to try to evade destruction together.

There are plenty of things wrong with “Final Destination 2.” The dialogue is wooden and the acting even more so, and David R. Ellis doesn’t show the acute eye or the skill of execution that James Wong brought to the previous picture. Some of the effects are very chintzy. The attempt to explicate what’s going on through the introduction of characters from the first installment (Ali Larter’s Clear Rivers and Tony Todd’s Mr. Bludworth) falls flat. An effort to construct a scenario connecting the events of the first picture with those in the current one is simply incomprehensible. (In fact, the picture fares worst when it tries to act like a true sequel rather than a retread.) But as in “FD1,” the various attack-and-destroy sequences are done with an extravagant complexity that turns them into virtual Rube Goldberg contraptions. Some of them work better than others (a couple are too reminiscent of bits from the first flick), but at least they show some imagination and panache, occasionally veering off where you don’t expect. And they often exhibit a tongue-in-cheek feel that lets the audience in on the joke: the one in a dentist’s office is especially good, appropriately enough.

So long as it sticks to its gorily over-the-top set-pieces (including a nifty last twist), “Final Destination 2” is a reasonably effective genre piece. Unfortunately, they’re continually interrupted by reams of desultory exposition, inane conversation and amateur-night acting–things that too often slow the picture down to a crawl. Moreover, there are two elements of the premise that continue to undermine the overall effectiveness. One’s the fact that the force doing all the killing is totally without a personality (something which Freddy Krueger, for instance, had in spades). The other is that there’s no “moral” cause for all the slaughter (even the “Friday the 13th” movies offered one, though it was admittedly terribly dumb)–simply put, the characters don’t do anything to “deserve” their fate. That fact makes it even more a simple slice-and-dice show than usual.

Still, “Final Destination 2” is superior to drek like the recent “Darkness Falls” or “They.” The inventiveness of the death scenes isn’t quite enough to compensate for the dullness of the rest, but it comes close.