It can be best described as “The Firm” meets “Oxford Blues” meets “Conspiracy Theory” in a disastrous menage. “The Skulls” is a mild psychological thriller murder mystery with conspiratorial underpinnings and boy-toy actors.

The film stars Joshua Jackson of “Dawson’s Creek” fame as Luke McNamara, a working class kid trying to climb his way up socially. He goes to an Ivy League school and wants to go to Harvard Law School. His only hope of making the tuition at Harvard is if he gets into a secret society known as the Skulls, hence the film’s title.

The Skulls are not just a fraternity. They initiate new members strictly by invitation, and only the best and brightest are invited to join. Membership has its privileges: Luke will have his tuition paid for, and twice a week the group meets in the lap of luxury. Money, cars, power and women are his.

Luke accepts and finds himself immediately at odds with his best friend Will Beckford, a curious student of journalism who believes that if a group is secret and elite, by definition it must also be bad.

While Caleb is looking for Will so they can heal the rift in their friendship, he walks into the newspaper office and finds Will swinging from the ceiling in an apparent suicide.

Luke’s new friend is Caleb Mandrake, his Skull soulmate. Caleb is a legacy whose father, Litten Mandrake (Craig T. Nelson, “The Osterman Weekend,” “Coach”), is the chairman of the group.

Caleb is a daddy’s boy who has had everything handed to him. Whenever he screws up, Dad gets him out of dutch. He is Luke’s opposite in many ways, yet the two have a grudging respect for each other’s strengths.

Caleb is the guy Luke has always wanted to be, and Caleb admires Luke’s ability to make it through life on his own terms.

Luke soon becomes suspicious that Will’s death was not a suicide and that Caleb had something to do with it. But he is screwed. He took an oath to put the Skulls and their rules before all else. Even if he wanted to do something, the Skulls are practically all-powerful and could easily crush him.

Still, Luke is possessed with strong morals and decides to enlist some of his old townie friends with shady criminal records to help him stick it to the Skulls and get some justice.

“The Skulls” isn’t the worst movie ever made, but it certainly pales in comparison to almost every other A-movie murder mystery thriller. Everything about it is competent, and that is about all.

None of the characters in this film make you care in the slightest about their cause. Too much emphasis is placed on surface characteristics. Luke seems like the last guy on earth who could not rationalize staying in the Skulls, getting all of the benefits and accepting the explanation he is handed for his friends death later in the film.

There is not enough time given to developing the characters early on. Luke and Will are both on the rowing team and seem to have a camaraderie, but everything about their friendship has to be spelled out in letters 10 feet high, and that makes it hard to believe. Will flies off the handle when Luke joins the Skulls even though he apparently knew Luke has wanted to join for four years.

Mandrake is supposed to come off as a man who would do any amount of evil without question to keep his son and his organization safe from interlopers. But the level of contrivance is so high and we are expected to buy this so readily that little is done that is not a stereotype seen elsewhere.

Much time is spent on making Luke seem righteously indignant, but none is spent exploring more serious questions like what the hell did he expect when he wanted to join a powerful secret society?

This movie could have actually posed some serious moral questions and explored them on screen, but instead it made a cut and dry thriller featuring a character who is not compelling, interesting or sympathetic.

“The Skulls” even brought back the gratuitous chase scene. The only twist is that the man doing the chasing was the provost of the college.

The only thing that can be said in the movie’s favor is that it didn’t stoop to gratuitous nudity in all the right spots to keep our interest.

2 Stars

Rating based on a 5 Star scale.