In The Man, a mind-numbingly formulaic cop-buddy movie, Samuel L. Jackson plays the man and Eugene Levy plays the weenie.

It's a standard-issue dynamic -- lifted from far, far better movies, ranging from Rush Hour to Midnight Run -- that plays one tough, efficient lawman off against a jabbering, screw-up sidekick.

In this case, it's Jackson's surly, unconventional ATF Special Agent Derrick Vann who, through a series of outlandish plot twists, finds himself partnered with Levy's Andy Fidler, an anal-retentive motormouth who works as a dental supplies salesman.

In the cut-and-paste screenplay bearing the fingerprints of five writers (all busy little pilferers), Vann and Fidler are thrown together when really dull-witted gunrunners mistake the mild- mannered Fidler for an international arms dealer.

The snarling Vann doesn't like it one bit, but he's forced to enlist the blabbering salesman in a sting operation to nab a silky, sinister Euro-mobster (played with oily ease by Luke Goss).

That's all you need to know about the paper-thin plot. The only reason it exists is to put the intense, slow-burning Jackson in a car on the mean streets of Detroit with the neurotic, nattering Levy and allow the comic fireworks to explode.

And explode they occasionally do -- especially in a misbegotten scene in which the two pull through a fast-food drive-in and only too late does Vann discover that red meat gives Fidler gas, explosive gas. Har-de-har.