In theaters

THE ART OF WAR, directed by Christian Duguay, written by Wayne Beach and Simon Davis Barry, based on a story by Beach. 105 minutes. Rated R.

August has always been Hollywood’s dumping ground, a month in which the worst movies of the year are dropped on audiences like great cinematic warheads.

A few good movies may sneak through – this August saw “Space Cowboys,” “Saving Grace” and “The Cell” – but junk is late summer’s mainstay, a maddening time for moviegoers desperate for better fare after being bludgeoned with reels of mindless crap (in this case, “Hollow Man,” “Autumn in New York,” “Bless the Child,” “The Replacements,” “Trixie” and “But I’m a Cheerleader”).

As bad as those movies are, only one – the abysmal “Autumn in New York” – comes close to the catastrophe that is Christian Duguay’s “The Art of War.” The movie plot is so convoluted, trite and poorly told, one wonders if Duguay or his screenwriters, Wayne Beach and Simon Davis Barry, ever read a book or saw a movie before attempting this, a film that’s so monstrously bad, it joins “Battlefield Earth” as the worst of the year.

“The Art of War” is tortuous in its banality, ridiculous in its contrivances, dull in its execution. It features Wesley Snipes in the lead, which will certainly draw audiences since Snipes can be great given the right role and script. But here his talents are squandered as Shaw, a United Nations secret agent out to thwart a villainous group intent on shutting down a pending trade agreement between the United States and China.

As straightforward as the plot sounds, Duguay and his screenwriters are intent on complicating it with unnecessary subplots, frenetic editing, blatant racism against Asians, blazing sound effects and glaring implausibilities. Can anyone really leap off five- and six-story buildings, as Snipes consistently does here, without breaking a leg? The filmmakers should have given us a break.

With Donald Sutherland perfectly miscast as the secretary general and Ann Archer as the United Nation’s scheming chief of security, a woman who speaks so slowly and methodically it sounds as if she’s swallowed a handful of Xanax, “The Art of War” is the sort of movie so desperate to show naked women, it goes to lengths few have gone to before: In a scene where Snipes and his co-star, Marie Matiko, are speaking in a car, the camera languorously pans back and forth across the air freshener dangling between them.

On the freshener is the picture of a naked woman, who comes into and out of focus as the scene drags on and on. It’s a remarkable moment, one that will leave some crying sexism and others looking for the woman’s name in the credits.

If the latter proves true and she does snag 15 minutes of fame out of this, it’s a shame, really. She’s done so in a movie that makes certain she’ll never be seen in theaters again.

Grade: F

THE CREW, directed by Michael Dinner and written by Barry Fanaro. 88 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Michael Dinner’s “The Crew,” from a screenplay by Barry Fanaro, who wrote more than 100 episodes of “The Golden Girls,” is the sort of decrepit slapstick comedy that should have been slapped with a better script.

It has a good cast and the trailer makes it look hilarious, but the experience of actually sitting through it is something altogether different.

The film stars Burt Reynolds, Dan Hedaya, Seymour Cassel and Richard Dreyfuss as four retired, crotchety mobsters living out their final days in a Miami Beach apartment complex.

As one of the characters observes, Miami Beach has changed “since that broad Madonna moved in.” Now, it’s no longer a haven for the elderly, but a boisterous party town overrun with a much younger group of men and women.

Worried that their apartment complex is becoming gentrified, the men hatch a plot meant to lower their property values, but, instead, they get caught up in a vicious war against a South American drug lord (Miguel Sandoval).

None of it works and that’s because the film makes the mistake of hinging its comedy not on its characters, but on its blatant plot contrivances. How contrived is it? Consider this: As the men get deeper into trouble and the police eventually come around, who should one of the detectives be but Bobby Bartellemeo’s (Dreyfuss) long-lost daughter (Carrie-Anne Moss)? Dinner tries to use this element to infuse his film with heart and soul, but all he really does is to expose the film’s wretched mechanics.

The best comedies work because we identify in some essential way with the characters; we are, in a sense, laughing at ourselves. In “The Crew,” there’s nobody to identify with, nobody who isn’t a stereotype, nobody who’s remotely believable – which, in the end, serves as the 10-pound nail in this film’s coffin.

Grade: D

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, and Tuesday and Thursday on “NEWS CENTER at 5:30” and “NEWS CENTER at 11.”