There are two principal reasons why such beliefs are gaining currency. The idea that the world is run by secretive, ruthless and unaccountable elites is becoming more and more popular, both on the fringes (countless internet sites burble about the pernicious influence of one group or another) and in the mainstream - what have the recent protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle and Prague been, if not a demonstration of this? This is a shame, and not just for the usual reasons that ill-focused movies are a shame. The Skulls spends the rest of its span trying to figure out whether it is a matinee thriller, teen romance or action romp, and the climactic scenes are as baffling as they are preposterous, something like Beverly Hills 90210 rewritten by John Woo, and not half as much fun as that might sound. Unfortunately, either or both director Cohen or writer John Pogue - who claims membership of a Yale secret society - lose their grip shortly after the opening half -hour. Had The Skulls continued in this vein, musing on the conflicts that arose from Luke trying to maintain his new life alongside his old, it might have made an interesting human drama, as well as a provocative meditation on class division on campuses in notionally egalitarian America. Those chosen for Skull And Bones are reputed to be welcomed aboard with a slightly less grandiose $15,000 and a grandfather clock. When Luke is selected by The Skulls, he is rewarded with a Breitling watch, $20,000 and a vintage sports car. We are also told that "the CIA was created within its walls" - and it is axiomatic that the CIA's second world war-era forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services, was stuffed to the gunwales with Yale graduates. The film's opening titles inform us that "three American presidents" are alumni of this ostensibly fictional club - back in the real world William Taft, George Bush and George W Bush are all alleged Bonesmen, as members are known. The Skulls in The Skulls are transparently modelled on the Yale University society Skull And Bones. The tension on which the film attempts to perch its plot is created when Luke is extended membership of a secret society of the more sinister sort: The Skulls. It comprises him and two fellow students at a posh American college: a girl he doesn't realise he loves (Chloe, played by Leslie Bibb) and his best friend and room-mate (Will, played by Hill Harper). In Rob Cohen's initially intriguing, eventually annoying and finally completely baffling new film The Skulls, his central protagonist, Luke McNamara, played by Joshua Jackson - the bloke off Dawson's Creek you don't want to smack in the mouth with a railway sleeper - is, at the outset, a member of just such a workaday cabal. For most of us, these societies are known as Me And My Mates, and they general pose little threat to humanity at large. We are all members of secret societies: close-knit groups whose rules of admission seem arbitrary or bizarre to outsiders, who express their solidarity with peculiar rituals and phrases, whose members look out for each other's interests and keep each other's secrets.
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