Holiday turkeys

...The thrills, however, are absent, the romance risible...

...A stereotypical Looney Tune pair romps through 48 Hrs.: cynical police detective Jack Cates (Nick Nolte) and jive-talkin' dude Reggie Hammond (Eddie Murphy...

...The problem is that everyone knows the actor has no red to worry about: Whenever we get a good look at him, those famous blue eyes sparkle like sapphires...

...The movie has already won some praise from Hill's admirers for having better developed characters than are usual in his work...

...After his progress in Who'll Stop the Rain?, he has sunk back to the level of The Deep...

...Once again, too many cooks...

...Throughout Benton seems to have staged events simply to ape Hitchcock, rather than to create a coherent plot...

...We can only yawn through about 45 minutes of Sam's blundering about, waiting to see how Benton is going to bring him, Brooke and the killer together for that stirring climax...

...and the plaintiffs themselves, the sister (Roxanne Hart) and brother-in-law (James Handy) of the comatose patient, who consider the Church's offer generous...

...Reggie has been sprung from prison to aid Cates in his search for two sadistic killers, Ganz (James Remar) and Billy Bear (Sonny Landham...

...Nolte does not enhance matters with his fake macho swagger and grunts...

...misery at being betrayed by Odets...

...Welcome back to the raft, Huck honey, and it's off on another trip down the Mississippi in the form of endless car chases along the streets of San Francisco...

...Shepard's part would have seemed unreal even if he acted well...

...In addition, the climax is lifted, I think, from Vertigo...

...In David Mamet's screenplay, based on Barry Reed's novel, the vehicle for this salvation is a malpractice suit...

...The lobotomy makes hardly any outward difference: Lange does slow her speech a little, yet her eyes are no more blank than before...

...And Andrzej Bartkowiak, no doubt following Lumet's instructions, turns Boston into another gray and oppressive Warsaw, to little artistic purpose...

...48 Hrs...

...She was also a perpetual malcontent, a rebellious misfit, an amphetamine addict, possibly an alcoholic, and an inmate of various mental institutions who was cruelly "rehabilitated" through insulin and electro-shock therapy (and probably raped and lobotomized to boot...

...Everything the two good guys do together resembles an audition for a TV series dreamed up by Leslie Fiedler...

...It involves a Roman Catholic archdiocese that runs a hospital where Galvin's client, a young woman, has been reduced to a permanent coma following an injection of the wrong anesthetic...

...The direction, by a first-timer named Graeme Clifford, is worse than undistinguished...

...Nothing in this movie adds up, least of all how Cates managed to weasel Reggie out of jail for the time period indicated by the title...

...Meryl Streep is Brooke Reynolds, one of those beautiful ladies with a dark secret beloved by hack writers...

...Sidney Lumet's heavy hand pounds home every moral about Catholicism, alcoholism and the law with the subtlety we have come to associate with the director of such ponderous cultural commentaries as Serpico, Network and The Pawnbroker...

...Everyone expects Galvin to settle out of court: the Church officials...

...Written and directed by Robert Benton (Kramer vs...

...helpless rage over her treatment at the hands of insensitive psychiatrists-All are hard to distinguish from her little moments...

...His psychiatrist, Sam Rice (Roy Scheider), meets and quickly falls in love with Brooke...

...Nor do we understand the willingness of Cates' superiors to keep him on the case after his egregious displays of incompetence...

...Scheider overacts furiously, as hedid in All That Jazz, but his good, or perhaps melodramatically intense, acting rarely overcomes the bad script...

...Still, for reasons that have less to do with dramatic logic than with fulfilling our expectations of any Newman role, Galvin decides to take the case to trial...

...As he investigates, he turns up a lot of herrings so red that we can scarcely believe he doesn't recognize them as such...

...But he doesn't...

...No doubt the biggest obstacle to credibility is the script, written by Hill and three co-authors...

...Whatever shortcomings Walter Hill has as a director, they do not include an inability to roll a scene over the audience like a truck...

...What we get is an episodic pseudo-biography that would be totally boring without its basis in reality...

...But Reggie and Cates are less interesting than Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote...

...With her overbite and pursed lips, she seems a pouting child-fine for when she is playing the teenage years, not for the bulk of the film when she has to portray a mature and complex woman...

...From the very start, however, it is clear that Galvin does have some pride, at least in his appearance...

...Or how seasoned policemen could lose two incredibly careless criminals not once, not twice, but three times?in broad daylight, despite lots of planning, loads of backup, and plenty of gunfire...

...For better or worse, you don't have much time for thought, anyway...

...This ersatz Hitchcock made me appreciate the real thing, a feat I didn't think possible...

...Sensitive) and Bruce Dern in anything (a goofy good ole boy...

...Kim Stanley marches around making a lot of grand, empty gestures...

...Do yourself a favor, don't waste your money on these holiday turkeys...

...A scene at an art auction that made sense in North by Northwest is pointlessly interjected into Still of the Night, for instance...

...The tragic heroine of an almost unbelievably unhappy real-life drama, Farmer was a prize-winning high schooler, a college student with Left-wing sympathies, a talented, glamorous actress (hailed as another Garbo) who bucked the studio system in the '30s and briefly abandoned Hollywood for New York and the Group Theatre...

...At one point, for example, Clifford Odets (Jeffrey De-Munn) tells her that he's written an "assault, a seduction" and she would be perfect as the female lead...

...he's always trying to get the red out with eye drops...

...Streep is far too brittle to convey the allure that Benton intended, yet probably no one could breathe life into such a cartoon figure...

...is briskly paced, like the best of his films (Hard Times), and like most of them (The Warriors, Southern Comfort), it stimulates the viscera while deadening the mind...

...Kramer, The Late Show), the film is allegedly a romantic thriller...

...Murphy's somewhat more palatable performance still seems like an extended shtick out of Saturday Night Live...

...He tries to understand her troubles and find the murderer through a kind of psychoanalytic detective inquiry...

...Except it's not so stirring...

...The only bar he has stood before lately was in a tavern, and his idea of a hard day's work is haunting funeral homes in search of clients among the bereaved...

...Her fury at her mother (Kim Stanley) for pushing her to a stardom she does not want, and then committing her to an asylum because she rejects the attention after she attains it...

...Cates is white, Reggie black, and they bitch at each other like lovers in a sitcom-say, Jeff Goldblum and Ben Ve-reen in the short-lived Tenspeed and Brownshoes, or Robert Culp and Bill Cosby in J Spy...

...Indeed, all of these films-the Verdict, Frances, Still of the Night, and 48 Hrs.-seem better suited to the small screen...

...In fact, the sole pretext for situating the film in the art world seems to have been Benton's desire to pay such dubious hommage...

...In fairness to the cast, it must be said that inept writing and directing are really at the root of Frances' problems...

...He also suspects Brooke is the culprit, though viewers with any sense can spot the real one halfway into the movie...

...their expensive legal team, led by the experienced Ed Concannon (James Mason...

...he tries to come across as a combination of Robert DeNiroin The Last Tycoon(a limp Mr...

...Eventually, so much unfolds in the story by pure coincidence and stupid luck, that you cease to care...

...She had been having an adulterous affair with her boss (Josef Sommer), a rather unpleasant art dealer who is murdered as the story begins...

...The cornball sincerity and "social significance" here could have been a lot better directed and photographed...

...Galvin's former partner, Mickey Morrissey (Jack Warden), responsible for getting his friend the case...

...Throughout, Lange's affectlessness destroys her "big moments...

...Over the years, Newman's face has gained such dignity along with the creases that the premise of the film is undermined...

...if the script didn't tell us that the mother's thwarted ambitions were partly responsible for the daughter's breakdown, we would never know it from Stanley, who doesn't seem remotely related to Lange...

...I had the same feeling watching Still of the Night...

...Although a couple of the scenes build up some dramatic intensity, they do not lend the script as a whole any unity, structure or rhythm...

...Unfortunately, Lange cannot muster the necessary pathos...

...Along the way, of course, he also regains his self-esteem...

...The 130-minute hodgepodge is the work of a committee: Eric Bergren, Christopher DeVore, and Nicholas Kazan are credited with the screenplay...

...It is Golden Boy...

...She replies in a little girl lisp that is virtually unintelligible, "Whuds tha naymmuf dhith ath-ault, dhith thuhducthion...

...We never discover why the cop needs to free the con just to discover facts (the killers' hangouts, their associates and girlfriends) he could have learned by questioning him in prison...

...Nobody who looks that handsome could ever be that down and out, so we are sure that Galvin is only marking time before he redeems himself...

...it's as ho-key as everything else here...

...The other actors are not much help, either...

...Similar straining for significance is apparent in Frances, a more or less true account of the destruction of Frances Farmer (Jessica Lange...

...the judge (MiloO'Shea), who is contemptuous of Galvin for wasting the court's time...

...After much artificial Sturm und Drang?a predictable surprise witness, someun-surprising last-minute legal maneuvers, a few expected revelations, a not very mysterious shady lady (Charlotte Ram-pling)-Galvin wins the suit and a huge amount of damages, though by an arbitrary jury decision, not the strength of his arguments...

...Often so little happens on screen that audiences must think they have stumbled in on a very early rehearsal where no one has yet told the performers what the point is...

...Sam Shepard appears as a fictionalized man named Harry York, who stands by her through thick and thin (if only someone actually had...