I am amazed at how this movie(and most others has a average 5 stars and lower when there are crappy movies averaging 7 to 10 stars on IMDb. The fanboy mentality strikes again. When this movie came out just about everyone slammed it. Even my ex-girlfriend said this movie questionable. Years later I sat down to watch this movie and I found myself enjoying. Even laughing quite a bit. This and The Replacement Killers are the movies that had people labeling the director Antoine Fuqua as the black Michael Bay. I don't see how since most of Fuqua's movies are smarter than anything Michael Bay has came up with. At any rate...
Story: Alvin Sanders(Jamie Foxx) is former convict that is used by a no-nonsense Treasury agent Edgar(David Morse) as a pawn to catch a killer named Bristol(Doug Hutchinson). Alvin's every moves are tracked by a bug implanted in his jaw after an accident. While these agents are after Bristol, Bristol is after the gold bricks that were taken in a heist gone awry.
Jamie Foxx is funny as well as great as Alvin Sanders. Alvin is a fast-talker that is a lot smarter than he lets on. Doug Hutchinson is okay as Bristol. He can be over-the-top sometimes in his John Malkovitchesque demeanor. He was better here than he was as Looney Bin Jim in Punisher: War Zone. David Morse is good as the hard edged treasury agent. Even Mike Epps is funny as Alvin's brother Stevie. Both him and Jamie had some funny moments on screen.
The only flaw of the movie is the some of the attempts at a thriller fall flat. The scenario at the horse race track is way over-the-top but I couldn't look away. The director went all out there so he gets points for that. Plus the bomb scene with the treasury agent tied to a chair while the detonator rests on the door was pretty nifty.
All in all Bait is not a bad movie by a long shot. Its never boring, its always funny and I wasn't checking my watch every minute. That should count for something. Bait is one of the most underrated movies of 2000 period.
PS: to the reviewer that claimed this movie is too violent.... How long have you been living under a rock? I'm pretty sure you've seen the Die Hard series and EVERY movie by Quentin Tarantino. But those movies aren't violent right? Weirdo.

There's no denying the first Azumi film was a commercial product; it was an adaptation of a popular manga and had cast of young, attractive actors and certainly wasn't lacking in the budget department. Yet it more than entertained for what it was, and I can't deny I enjoyed it immensely.
"Azumi 2" lacks just about everything that made the original so wonderful. The first thing that should set alarm bells ringing is the absence of the superb Ryuhei Kitamura at the helm. With him, he seemed to take not only his own visual flair and kinetics, but the originals style, beauty and most importantly, its heart. While the first had a simple "hitlist" plot, this one has a corkscrew mess of a story, with too many dull characters stabbing each other in the back so many times the potential for any sympathy or pathos is obliterated. Gone is the effective interplay between the lead characters; Azumi and her cohorts are often reduced to a bunch of stroppy teenagers arguing in a forest. Characterisation is non existent; if anyone watching actually cares who lives and who dies, I'll be shocked. The same applies to the villains here. The final battle - in fact all the battles - are completely devoid of any sort of tension. The fact that they are poorly choreographed and abysmally directed - not to mention few and far between - is made a sideline by their own sheer pointlessness. The villains themselves try far too hard to be campy, and even if they were all combined, they don't come within a country mile of the Pete Burnsian antics of Jo Odagiri in the original.
####Major Spoiler at end of paragraph!#####
Aya Ueto tries her best it has to be said, and she also managed to keep her hair in good condition between the films. Azumi is now a fully fledged assassin, meaning she can wave her sword around in slow motion; unfortunately, now the character is instilled with a sort of Man With No Name style mysteriousness, Ueto's model looks become even more inappropriate. I know this is supposed to be the point, but this combined with the ineffectiveness of everyone else in the film, the stupidity of the plot and the general ineptness of the film in general means it is downright impossible to get behind her character this time around. The less said about Chiaki "Remember me from Kill Bill" Kuriyama's performance the better; it suffices to say her "turn" from good to evil is about as subtle as napalm.
Overall, this was just a colossal disappointment. Any merits is does have were done ten times better in the first film. A lazy, unsatisfying - and generally downright boring - mess.