'Showtime' a stale cop show spoof
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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from March 2002.
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Spoofing reality TV also is worn out. Last year, "Series 7" satirized reality-based game shows, and "15 Minutes" indicted the pathetic human desire to do whatever it takes to be on television - even if it entails killing someone. So by spoofing buddy-cop movies and reality police shows, "Showtime" feels really stale.
It's funny at first when it sends up cliches, with Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy as mismatched Los Angeles police officers thrown together for a slick "COPS"-style TV show.
De Niro plays Mitch Preston, who's the opposite of his media darling -"15 Minutes" character; at a crime scene, Mitch shoves a tenacious TV photographer to the ground and shoots his camera lens.
Murphy co-stars as Trey Sellars, who dreams of being on television. He repeatedly bombs on auditions when he's not ruining evidence or chasing after the wrong suspects.
Enter Chase Renzi (Rene Russo), a scheming producer for a TV network whose logo bears more than a slight resemblance to the Fox searchlights. (A dig from competitor Warner Bros.?) She sees Mitch in action and immediately senses that he'd make great TV. All he needs is a partner, she thinks, preferably a minority. The result: "Showtime" - the title comes from Trey's catchphrase - and the show is an instant hit.
In the movie's funniest moments, Trey's like Axel Foley, Murphy's "Beverly Hills Cop" character, if he took himself too seriously. He can't just run after a suspect - he has to roll across the hood of his car first. And he always looks in the camera and utters the most painful police cliches when he makes an arrest.
But when the movie's action turns serious - the plot, such as it is, has something to do with drug dealing and gun smuggling - director Tom Dey uses the same conventions he just got done ridiculing.
Dey — who was much more successful in his directing debut, the 2000 buddy flick "Shanghai Noon" — relies on car chases through downtown alleys, patrol cars that catch fire and explode, and pointless, endless shootouts.
Even trotting out William Shatner to laugh at his own image isn't original; he did it in Priceline.com commercials, the pageant satire "Miss Congeniality," and the defunct sitcom "3rd Rock From the Sun." His presence here, as himself, is a welcome sight at first. Chase hires the former "T.J. Hooker" star to train Mitch and Trey to bust through doors and flop on a hood to stop a suspect's car, but the gag gets repetitive and draggy.
De Niro and Murphy are solid, as always, and look like they're actually having fun from time to time. But Russo, whose character is singularly driven and devious, is unusually unappealing.
And the villain — the creation of three screenwriters, besides Jorge Saralegui's "story by" credit — is a vaguely ethnic gun dealer/drug smuggler who's a "Kato" Kaelin look-alike. Speaking of 15 minutes.
"Showtime," a Warner Bros. release, is rated PG-13 for action violence, language and some drug content. Running time: 95 minutes. Two stars — one for De Niro and one for Murphy, and that's being charitable.
