It happens this way every year.

It all started in January of 1999 when my high school newspaper sadistically assigned me to review She's All That.

Naturally, after seeing it, I wrote a scathing review and predicted it was the worst movie I'd see all year, even though it was also the first movie I'd seen all year.

I was right.

In January 2000, a retrospectively regrettable social engagement lured me to yet another Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle, the wannabe-Woodyish teen rom-com Down to You. Once again, the first and worst.

And so the streak continued through 2001's AntiTrust, and then I didn't see a worse movie last year than January's Cradle 2 the Grave, although, to be fair, I also didn't see Gigli.

But, despite all this, I was foolishly optimistic about seeing The Big Bounce, which as you should be able to intuit by now, was the first and will almost certainly be the worst movie I'll have the misfortune of seeing in 2004.

The movie is based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, who is one of my very favorite authors that I've never read. His books inspired the films Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, and Out of Sight.

It's set in Hawaii, a nice backdrop for a lighthearted caper. It also features a cast of considerable talent, both comical (Owen Wilson, Bebe Neuwirth) and dramatic (Morgan Freeman, Gary Sinise).

Unfortunately, none of them are given the opportunity to exhibit any of that talent here.

Owen Wilson stars in a part so dull, even his dull brother Luke would have turned it down.

He plays a thief/surfer who, for reasons unexplained, becomes the object of a bunch of scam artists' obsessions.

Beautiful newcomer Sara Foster wants Wilson to steal some money from her rich lover's safe.

They have one of those romantic trysts in which neither knows if they can trust one another, but they have lots of PG-13 sex anyway.

Freeman, who has made a living appearing in bad movies for the last eight years, stoops to a new nadir with his portrayal of Wilson's boss, a slothfully underwritten state judge/resort owner or something.

Anyone who can't figure out what his character is really up to must be lucky enough to have avoided a slew of lousy Hollywood heist movies from the past few years.

That's actually a misnomer, though.

The Big Bounce isn't a heist movie.

Neither was Heist (ironically) or Confidence.

They were overblown double-cross yarns.

In these films, the heist itself is decentralized in favor of elaborate twists. I'll never understand what makes the studios believe that all we want from an alleged suspense thriller is a series of boring plot revelations so predictably absurd that they contradict everything we've learned about the characters up to that point.

Take two of the better heist movies from recent years, Ocean's Eleven and the first Mission: Impossible.

It isn't the melodrama of who's deceiving whom that keeps us interested.

In both cases, we loved watching them pull off the scam, and we loved the finesse with which the scamming was done.

Not only is there no visible finesse in The Big Bounce; there's no scam, except of course the studio's scam of suckering me into buying a ticket for another crappy January clunker.