A popcorn flick for sure, Brett Ratner's "After the Sunset" gets so wrapped up in showing us exotic locales, sunny beaches and gorgeous women - OK, one stunningly beautiful woman - that it often seems more like a travelogue than a heist caper.<br /><br />Screenwriters Paul Zbyszewski and Craig Rosenberg try to mix a buddy picture with a heist film and wind up with something not wholly satisfactory, a film devoid of any real surprises or grit. True, they have some attractive stars. But they also needed an engaging story.<br /><br />"After the Sunset" is supposed to be breezy fun. We accept what's happening on screen because we want to. After all, if we thought too much about it, the opening sequence would make little sense. It's also a set-up for a later payoff. Unfortunately, that's just another of many cinematic clichés that riddle this film.<br /><br />This film desperately wants to be different. It wants to tell us not about the planning and execution of a heist, but what happens when two robbers - Max Burdett (Pierce Brosnan) and Lola Cirillo (Salma Hayek) - retire to a gorgeous island away from FBI jurisdiction and find out paradise isn't exactly all that it's cut out to be and that robbers get bored. Well, at least one does. Fine, but then give us something exciting, a story we can get involved with.<br /><br />Brosnan plays Max much like he played Bond - suave and light. Harrelson mugs most of the time and Don Cheadle, the best of the bunch, is wasted in a role that had tremendous possibilities. <br /><br />The lovely Hayek's the film's strongest asset. Clad in tight dresses, bikinis and showing off plunging necklines, she struts about the screen oozing charm and sexuality. She even makes building a deck look hot. And when all else fails, she leans forward to allow us to glimpse her cleavage. That's about as exciting as this caper gets.<br /><br />Although the film's about an FBI agent (Woody Harrelson) tailing Max because he's convinced the crook is going to steal the third "Napoleon Diamond" from a visiting cruise ship, this really isn't a cat-and-mouse picture. That would have been something - to turn this into a battle of wits between two fiercely competitive and charming men. Instead, the writers rely on unfunny bonding rituals replete with homophobic jokes and one-liners that don't have any zing to propel their story. Throwing Harrelson and Brosnan in bed together for a lame sequence is what counts as funny to the writers and director.<br /><br />Lackadaisically directed by Ratner, who made the "Rush Hour" films and turned "Red Dragon" (2002) into simply another serial-killer flick, "After the Sunset" just doesn't know when to quit. It's as if Ratner and the writers kept thinking of endings until they found one they liked. And then they put them all in. What's even more galling is that these chaps are so sloppy and unoriginal, they devised the most hackneyed ending to a crucial shoot-out.<br /><br />What this boils down to is terrible, by-the-numbers storytelling and film-making. Not only are the actors seemingly merely going through the motions, but so are the director and the writers. When it comes to heist films, give me "The Asphalt Jungle" (1950), "Rififi" (1955), "The Killing" (1956) or "Topkapi" (1964) any day. Forty, fifty years later, these films remain gritty, fun, exciting and entertaining as they ever were.