What's funny? Not Robert De Niro.
Often correctly cited as one of the premier American actors of his generation, De Niro seems to be wasting his wonderful dramatic talents, spinning his wheels in mediocrity, mugging his way through lame comedies.
Consider titles such as Showtime, Rocky And Bullwinkle, Analyze This, and now, Analyze That.
Not that he hasn't been funny at some point. Martin Brest's Midnight Run (1988) deftly set De Niro's primal energy against Charles Grodin's droll wit. The results were sly, bittersweet and quietly hilarious.
Then there are De Niro's off-beat moments in non-comedies. Billy Crystal -- who plays the hapless psychiatrist obliged to treat De Niro's psychotic Mafioso in the two Analyze flicks -- makes the case that his co-star and friend is also funny in most of his serious, dramatic films.
Not funny ha-ha, not silly, but funny in that devious, unlikely and interesting way that human beings can be when they turn even the most desperate situations into moments of absurdity. Laugh or die. De Niro has always triumphed when plumbing the murky depths of human nature.
In that context, De Niro is far funnier -- in brief explosions that smack audiences upside the head -- in his great films such as Bang The Drum Slowly, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Brazil, The Godfather: Part II, GoodFellas and Jackie Brown. The funny moments may be brief and unexpected, but they are pointed and often poignant.
In lesser but still quality films such as King Of Comedy, Wag The Dog, Cape Fear, Casino and This Boy's Life, De Niro uses flashes of light to illuminate dark passages of the story.
But, when he is just "BEING FUNNY" in big, broad strokes, it rarely works. His best flat-out comedy is probably Meet The Parents. Yet even the memory of that amusing trifle, in which De Niro played the heavy to Ben Stiller's panicked future son-in-law, could be ruined by a planned sequel.
In the Analyze movies, De Niro just squinches his eyes, barks, screams, bullies, tosses off mindless profanities, acts stupid and does a crass, superficial version of a gangster.
This from a man who played gangsters so superbly for Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. For Harold Ramis, director of both Analyze This and Analyze That, De Niro reduces the iconic heavy to a Saturday Night Live cartoon skit, as if he were a second-rate actor doing an imitation of the real Robert De Niro playing a Mafioso. It's hideous.
WHAT A WASTE
And, in Analyze That, you have to watch him singing and dancing to Broadway show tunes. This is supposed to prove that De Niro's character Paul Vitti -- who is now running his ward in the Sing Sing prison in New York State -- has gone catatonic, and therefore needs the help of Crystal's psychiatrist character Ben Sobel.
Of course, it is just a ruse to get out of jail. Which he does. There is also some kind of convoluted gang war and FBI operation involved, along with some nonsense about a gold bullion heist and a farcical version of The Sopranos. What a waste of one of Hollywood's master actors.
(This film is rated AA)
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