Saturday, December 27, 2014


Movie Review

Showtime (2002)

March 15, 2002

FILM REVIEW; Making Fun Of Cop Movies

Published: March 15, 2002

The funniest parts of ''Showtime,'' a new (though only in the loosest sense) buddy action comedy starring Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy, come before the credits and in the short blooper reel at the end. That leaves an hour and a half for breaking glass, exploding cars and elaborate broad-daylight car chases. Moments of humor -- and some amusing byplay from Mr. Murphy, Mr. De Niro and a good-humored (and one hopes well-compensated) supporting cast, including Rene Russo, William Shatner and Mos Def -- are buried in glass, bullets and the discarded pages of three or four dozen other buddy action comedies, a few of them starring Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy.

But never together, you see. A small fortune in salaries and stunt cars might have been saved if the director, Tom Dey, had spliced together bits and pieces of ''Midnight Run'' and ''48 Hours'' (and, for that matter, ''Shrek''). But perhaps that's not fair. Those were completely different movies. In ''Midnight Run'' Mr. De Niro played a glowering, antisocial bounty hunter, and in ''48 Hours'' Mr. Murphy was a flashy, fast-talking petty crook. And this time out Mr. De Niro is a glowering, antisocial police detective and Mr. Murphy plays a flashy, fast-talking patrolman. Moreover, ''Showtime'' is meant to be satire, making rib-poking fun of cop movies and buddy action comedies and also, in a more topical vein, of the little-noticed phenomenon of reality television.

But satire -- if that's the right term for winking references to old television shows, real-life celebrities (like the lawyer Johnnie Cochran and Mr. Shatner, both of whom play themselves) and the news media -- is not a vaccine against stupidity. More and more these days, as movies try to camouflage their lack of imagination with knowing cleverness, it's just another form of stupidity.

In the first precredit teaser, Mr. De Niro's character, an unsmiling 28-year L.A.P.D. veteran named Mitch Preston, declares that ''being a police officer is not what you see on television'' and dismisses many of the action-movie clichÃ©s he will confront in the next 90 minutes. Meanwhile, Mr. Murphy's character, Trey Sellars, who dreams of being an actor as well as a detective, sends up the cop-show sentimentality that will later provide the movie's supposed emotional payoffs. At an audition, he does a station-house scene with a black actor playing a gruff senior officer, which would be a jab at the racial typecasting of shows like ''N.Y.P.D. Blue'' if Frankie R. Faison did not turn up a few scenes later playing a gruff, desk-bound commanding officer. ''Showtime'' plays every convention twice, once as parody and once by the book, but the movie, trying to be two things at once, fails at both.

Preston and Sellars meet during a failed undercover drug operation, which catches the attention of Chase Renzi (Ms. Russo), a television producer who dreams up a reality show to revive her flagging network. Once Renzi and her assistant have paired the eager Sellars with the reluctant Preston, they refurbish the station house and Preston's house to make them more visually exciting. To do the same for the movie, Mr. Dey breaks glass and sets vehicles on fire in the service of a barely coherent subplot involving a foreign-accented super bad guy (Pedro DamiÃ¡n) and his enormous gun.

The only intelligence on display in ''Showtime'' belongs to Mr. De Niro and Mr. Murphy, who have fun riffing on their familiar screen personas. That the characters are nothing new is clearly the point, and the two actors gamely go about doing what they do best. Sellars shamelessly plays to the ubiquitous cameras and seems to tote his own soundtrack around, like Pigpen's cloud of dirt in ''Peanuts.'' Preston is turned inward, his face a knot of impatient disgust; the recurrent joke is that he can't act to save his life and is un coachable even by the great William Shatner. The one thing Mr. De Niro and Mr. Murphy have in common -- a trait that has enlivened their best performances -- is an edge of hostility, an ability to freeze the laughter in the audience's mouth with a look. But ''Showtime'' lacks the wit to make use of it or to probe the rich subtext of race and masculinity that used to be the point of movies like this.

Instead, it plays cute with law enforcement and media exploitation. Early on, Preston shoots a video camera. Later on, he hides a gun inside one, using the lens as a barrel extension. Could there be a metaphor in there somewhere, a commentary on the pervasiveness of violent video imagery, or on the troubled state of the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution in postmodern America? No: if those bullets smashing through cameras symbolize anything, it's this movie's pointless, wanton self-destruction.

''Showtime'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Its many violent scenes are carefully edited to minimize the portrayal of bloodshed and suffering, and the frequent bursts of profanity do not include the words that guarantee an R rating.


Directed by Tom Dey; written by Keith Sharon, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, based on a story by Jorge Saralegui; director of photography, Thomas Kloss; edited by Billy Weber; music by Alan Silvestri; production designer, Jeff Mann; produced by Mr. Saralegui and Jane Rosenthal; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 95 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.

WITH: Robert De Niro (Mitch Preston), Eddie Murphy (Trey Sellars), Rene Russo (Chase Renzi), Frankie R. Faison (Captain Winship), William Shatner (Himself), Johnnie Cochran (Himself), Mos Def (Lazy Boy) and Pedro DamiÃ¡n (Vargas).

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