While this latest romantic setback serves as the impetus for Cusack’s overdue self-examination, it’s the movie’s weakest plotline. The best parts involve the banter between Cusack, Black and Luiso as well as Cusack’s straightforward soliloquies to the camera. See this one for the acting, whip-smart dialogue and soundtrack. Forget the romance.

Although one’s beliefs on capital punishment will affect Leuchter’s impact, the movie becomes truly freaky when he’s hired to prove that the Holocaust was a lie. After nearly 30 minutes of watching Leuchter describe how happenstance led him to being perceived as an expert among state prisons, we watch as he undertakes a clandestine, laughably “scientific” examination of Auschwitz. Hired by a Canadian revisionist historian legal team, guess what he finds? That amazingly, 50 years after the fact, the lab could find no evidence of a gaseous substance which leaves little evidence on stone, brick or mortar in the first place. To this day, Leuchter remains dismayed and even hurt that his Auschwitz examination was not his crowning achievement.

“Dawson’s Creek” star Joshua Jackson is a college kid from the wrong side of the bank ledger who somehow gets tapped for The Skulls. He’s in love with former St. Gertrude’s gal Leslie Bibb (star of WB’s “Popular”), but he can’t tell her ‘cuz “her parents own a private jet and I’ve never been in a jet.” When another friend meets an untimely end, Jackson and Bibb set out to solve the mystery. Jackson and Bibb do fine with what they’re given, they just ain’t given much.

As mindless entertainment with some spectacular animation and a funny, hip riff on those old Bing Crosby/Bob Hope road movies, “The Road to El Dorado” succeeds. Just don’t look for any clear-cut moral message or an inspiring adventure.