In theaters

REMEMBER THE TITANS 113 minutes, PG; directed by Boaz Yakin, written by Gregory Allen Howard.

Walt Disney Pictures has a new cartoon out. It’s called “Remember the Titans,” a film whose true story has been ruthlessly squeezed into – and distilled by – that famous Disney formula.

Apparently, if one works hard enough – as director Boaz Yakin and his screenwriter Gregory Allen Howard have – even a story about racism in high school football during the early 1970s can be applied to that formula.

My position is this: If you’re going to play the race card to make some serious money at the box office (last weekend, the film made $21.2 million), you’d better lose the feel-good clutter and the swelling violins, and be prepared to tackle the subject seriously. Otherwise, all you’ve done is to create a film that insults those who fought against racism and discrimination in the past – certainly those who fought against it during the period in which the film is set – and those fighting against it now.

“Titans” doesn’t suffer from bad performances – Denzel Washington, its star, is fine as Herman Boone, a black man brought in to coach a newly integrated football team. It just suffers from a wealth of bad decisions.

It’s one of those movies that dares to bring up the issue of race relations between blacks and whites in a recently desegregated town, only to resolve the tension and ongoing conflict with a ridiculous gimmick.

In this case, that gimmick is the film’s insistence on allowing the T.C. Williams High School football team to burst into sudden bouts of song whenever the going gets rough.

What’s one to do when punched in the face on the basis of skin color? Grab your buddies and sing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” What’s one to do when the white boys and black boys are about to go at each other’s throats in the locker room? Just break into song and it’ll all be okay!

It’s just this sort of rotten over simplification and cheesy theatrics that make potentially important movies such as “Titans” such a huge disappointment.

More than anything, the film wants audiences to believe it’s important. It wants us to feel it’s tackling race and race issues, but it’s not. Worse, it’s not even interested in remembering the Titans, who accomplished something remarkable and deserved a film that honestly and thoughtfully reflected that accomplishment. Instead, what audiences got is a film whose only interest is in shooting for Oscar gold on the coattails of race and racial discrimination during a time when our country is still coming to terms with it.

Grade: D

On Video

U-571 115 minutes. PG- 13; directed by Jonathan Mostow, written by Jonathan Mostow, Sam Montgomery and David Ayer.

Lock and load, people. Arm yourselves well and take no chances. Right now in video stores, a bunch of cardboard stereotypes are lying in wait to take you down with stiff performances and preposterous dialogue.

Look sharp. Pay attention. Be wary of those plot holes. Nobody needs to be a victim here, unless, of course, it’s director Jonathan Mostow. He’s the director behind “U-571,” a strictly by-the-numbers submarine potboiler that has zero interest in its characters.

That’s right, troops – zero. Ironic? Hell, yes. Apparently, everyone but Mostow knows the armed forces are supposed to be about building character. He doesn’t do so here. Unlike other submarine thrillers – “Das Boot,” “The Hunt for Red October” and “Crimson Tide,” all of which succeeded in large part because of the emotional weight given by their sharply drawn characters – Mostow isn’t at all interested in human drama.

Instead, his focus is on his plot: A German U-boat carrying the Nazi Enigma machine has been damaged in the mid-Atlantic. The United States, desperate to retrieve the machine so it can crack the Nazi radio codes, devises a mission to remove it from the crippled boat and get it into the hands of the Navy.

The particulars of that mission and its surprises won’t be revealed here, but if you’ve seen 1958’s “Run Silent, Run Deep” and 1957’s “The Enemy Below,” you’ll have a good idea of the pieces and parts that make up “U-571.”

Mostow does get a fair performance out of Matthew McConaughey as the young naval lieutenant faced with carrying out the film’s mission, but Harvey Keitel is wasted, Jon Bon Jovi is reduced to showcasing his jawline, and Bill Paxton delivers his worst performance ever. He’s so bad here, so wooden and clearly uncomfortable in his role as McConaughey’s superior officer, I kept wishing a twister would blow in and sweep him out to sea.

“U-571” isn’t a complete wash. It does generate heat in its well-staged battle sequences, and Mostow proves masterful in swinging his camera around the ship’s tight, authentically claustrophobic atmosphere. But with dialogue this bad (“This is the Navy, where a commanding officer is a mighty and terrible thing!”) and without ever knowing the people we’re asked to root for, this film, quite simply, sinks.

Grade: C-

THE SKULLS 107 minutes, PG-13; directed by Rob Cohen, written by John Pogue.

In the hilariously awful thriller “The Skulls,” director Rob Cohen and screenwriter John Pogue apparently have seen Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” and Roman Polanski’s “The Ninth Gate” a few too many tmes.

In this brainless, numbskull of a movie, they ask audiences to once again suffer a bunch of rich fools putting on dark cloaks for bizarre rituals held at swanky gothic mansions.

Been there, disrobed for that, don’t care to do so again.

The difference in “Skulls” is who is putting on these cloaks: An elite, secret group of Ivy League morons who not only want to rule the world, but who also, apparently, want to get it on with as many pricey prostitutes as they can.

And who says a good education can’t buy class?

Clearly inspired by Yale’s Skull and Bones society (the filmmakers deny this for good reason), of which the GOP’s own George Dubya was a member, the film follows Joshua Jackson’s Luke McNamara, a young man tapped by the Skulls to have a life of privilege and bounty. Almost immediately, Luke is given – on the basis of his broad shoulders, high cheekbones and way-cool rowing ability – a $20,000 membership gift, a ’63 T-bird convertible and access to sophistication, prestige, power and wealth. Good for him.

Well, not so good for him. After a pretty weird hazing ritual that includes drugs and coffins, Luke learns that the Skulls aren’t good ol’ boys at all. That’s right, they’re murderers. But can Luke get out of the society alive?

What do you think?

Dumb doesn’t begin to describe this movie, so here are a few words that do – laughable, embarrassing, emotionally dead, creatively bankrupt and woefully inept.

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” on WLBZ 2 and WCSH 6.