What the hell happened to Jon Bon Jovi?

That is the biggest movie mystery of the summer. It's not how "Scary Movie" could possibly top the box office. And it's not why Robert DeNiro decided to play nice with Rocky and Bullwinkle. No, the biggest mystery is trying to find out what happened to that good 'ol Jersey boy (and I don't mean the new album).

Experienced moviegoers already know what I'm talking about. For the rest of you who may not have seen "U-571" or who didn't notice, I'll explain. The WWII thriller is about a group of American sailors, led by Matthew McConaughey and Harvey Keitel, who take over a crippled Nazi U-boat and are then forced to escape in the sub after their own U.S. Navy submarine is destroyed. There's a scene about halfway through the movie where the Americans have just captured the Nazi's Enigma codebreaker and are preparing to return to their own sub about a few hundred feet away. The American sub, however, is eradicated, along with most of the crew, from a torpedo from another Nazi sub nearby. It's a great scene, maybe the best in the movie, except for one thing: I don't know what happened to Jon Bon Jovi.

Bon Jovi plays Naval Officer Lt. Pete Emmett, McConaughey's best friend among the crew of the American sub. He boards the Nazi U-boat along with McConaughey and the rest of the mission team, shoots some Nazis and saves the day. But when the torpedo hits the American sub and all hell breaks loose, he vanishes and the audience never sees him again. In fact, several characters are apparently killed off in the explosion but you can't really tell at first who is dead and who survived. This is because the editing in this particular segment of the film has more holes than Sonny Corleone. This disappointed me because the movie is excellent, directed with skill and innovation by Jonathan Mostow, who also directed the superior 1997 Kurt Russell thriller "Breakdown." I figured since Bon Jovi was a major character in the movie, they'd have given him a more appropriate send-off. I discovered later that Mostow had constructed quite a gruesome death scene for Bon Jovi but it was later abandoned because of what I call the "PG-13 Curse."

The curse attacks certain movies that should be rated R but are dumbed down by producers and studios because producers and studios are, well, dumb. They want movies that are more marketable, and that means letting kids in to see them as well (after all, it was all those teenage girls pining for 'Leo' again and again who shot "Titanic" to the top of box office history). Well, I appreciate the sentiment of making movies appealing and accessible to a broad audience, but let's use a bit gray matter for a moment. Was World War II a "PG-13" war? No. Are war movies usually acceptable for young children to watch? Nope, again.

Yet someone got a clever notion to edit the film so that it could get a PG-13 rating, which is a shame because Mostow was on to something. Was "U-571" going to be in the caliber of "Saving Private Ryan"? Certainly not, but it was more than just an action film and could have been a great war movie if it had been allowed to retain some of the violence that you expect in war movies. John Woo can make a PG-13 action movie in "Mission: Impossible II" because he's John Woo. Bryan Singer can make a PG-13 "X-Men," even with Wolverine gutting Mystique with his metal claws, because it's a comic book after all. But a WWII movie? There's just no excuse. Shielding an audience from needless violence is one thing; shielding them from the obvious brutality of war is just idiotic.

I don't know who made the decision at Universal to stick the movie with the "PG-13 Curse," but whoever they were, they probably think they made the right move since the movie did well at the box office. This is unfortunate, because it will only lead more executives in Hollywood to tone down violence and graphic content not for ethical motives but merely for profit.

The Motion Picture Associate of America is also to blame. The more I see the MPAA operate, the more I agree with Trey Parker and Matt Stone—they're just rolling the bones when it comes to making decisions about content and ratings. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to their job. I love Mike Meyers, but how else do you explain the fact that "The Spy Who Shagged Me," with all its overt sexual humor (not to mention Fat Bastard's ass crack), slipped by with a PG-13 rating but "The Insider" got an R rating because of its 'mature content' (Al Pacino says the f-word a few times, big f-ing deal)? If the MPAA really wanted to do some useful editing this year, it should have axed Mark Whalberg's God-awful, monstrously sappy inner monologue from the end of "The Perfect Storm" before it ruined the entire movie.

The "PG-13 Curse" is shamefully ridiculous and it's only going to get worse. The current guard in control of major movie studios clearly has no respect for artistic integrity and no concept of quality filmmaking. So get used to the curse. Unfortunately, it's here to stay.