"Gone in 60 Seconds" wants to be a dusky, adrenaline-driven joy ride of car chases and ultra-cool criminal heroes, but it's so bland that it only manages to be exciting for about 20 seconds at a time.

This year's brain-dead summer action entry from producer Jerry Bruckheimer -- king of expensive, MTV-edited, cookie-cutter, popcorn crap pics for the easily entertained ("The Rock," "Con Air," "Armageddon") -- it stars Nicolas Cage as Memphis Raines, a reformed car thief forced back into "the game" when his inept younger brother (Giovanni Ribisi) bungles an assignment to swipe 50 rare cars for smuggling overseas.

A furniture-obsessed mobster ("They call him The Carpenter. He's bad. Really bad."), played by former art film denizen Christopher Eccleston, has threatened to kill Ribisi if Cage doesn't deliver the same 50 cars in 72 hours. So he abandons his modest, honest job running a go cart race track in a desert town and re-assembles his old crew of generically eccentric tough guys from central casting (with oh-brother nicknames like Mirror Man, Tumbler, The Sphinx), and one sexy tomboy ex-girlfriend (Angelina Jolie in a blond dreadlock wig), to pull off the heists -- all in one night.

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