Odd-numbered Trek movies suck. Compare the Trek 2, 4 and 6 (Ricardo Montalban and earwigs, chasing whales, trapped in prison with Iman) to 1, 3, and 5 (bald chick, walking around in the wind with a boy Spock and Doc from Back To The Future, looking for God in all the wrong places). Same goes for the two Picard films. Generations showed the Captain swooning over "A Child's Christmas in Wales", First Contact was a robot zombie movie with Alfre Woodard and the farmer from Babe.

Insurrection does little to change the pattern. The plot centers on the Enterprise's discovery of a high-ranking Federation Admiral getting into bed with a leathery faced alien (F. Murray Abraham) to mine a peaceful planet's "fountain of youth." In doing this, though, they will displace the planet's population, thus violating the Prime Directive. So our boys have to help the peaceful, nubile, toga-wearing, aqueduct-using, technology-shunning, hyper-intelligent folk called the Ba'ku to resist.

I'd love to see Insurrection with Al Sharpton. The Ba'ku (a race so intelligent it chooses to live without Sony Playstations, despite having advanced scientific knowledge), is maybe one or two shades darker than Eddie and Johnny Winter. There's also the highly Clintonian way the evil Admiral parses his words, describing how displacing the Ba'ku does not technically violate the Prime Directive (it all depends on your definition of the words 'photon torpedo').

This is all academic. I go to Star Trek movies for two reasons: to see nerdish pseudo-science and to watch shit blow up. There are some good examples of the former, like when Picard rhapsodizes about his days as an Ensign, when he could tell just by listening how many microns a ship function was displaced. Sadly, there was not much of the latter.

Most of the special effects looked cheap and quick. The bulk of the action involved the Enterprise team holding doofy-looking plastic rifles and picking off giant, buzzing darts in a park. I'm serious. The darts would, like, beam them.

In lieu of fight scenes, there's enough new-agey faux philosophy to make Yanni cringe. Picard learns to live within the moment with his 319 year old girlfriend, so much so that hummingbirds fly at half speed. Slow-moving birds . . . just what this franchise needed.

F. Murray Abraham overacts so miserably I half expected him to shout "Curses!" once his plan was foiled. I saw the guy play Lear . . . he must've needed to make a payment on a house.

Will I go see the next Trek flick? Probably. It being an even-numbered film, the odds are on my side.