Playing To The Crowds

FUNNY THING ABOUT THE TERM crowd pleaser. Depending on who's using it, it's just as likely to be condescending as complimentary. Like a people pleaser, a crowd pleaser is automatically suspected of being insincere and manipulative. If found innocent of these charges, it's no longer called a crowd pleaser, but a ""classic'' (think ""E.T.'' or ""Casablanca'').

Crowd pleasing is what Hollywood summer movies are supposed to be about, though it's beginning to seem possible that, for the first time in years, no one movie is going to become a runaway hit this season. The American crowd, at least, may be getting harder to please, which may account for the frenzied tone that infects so many recent films. Lethal Weapon 4, the latest installment in the buddy-cop-comedy series, is a case in point. A manic, steroid-enhanced mixture of jokes, explosions and crunching violence, Richard Donner's sequel is more than eager to please--it's desperate.

All the familiar elements are in place, ratcheted up a notch. There's Danny Glover's exasperation, Mel Gibson's jokey recklessness, Joe Pesci's yapping-dog nudginess, not to mention enough fires to suggest a pyromaniac behind the scenes. Donner and screenwriter Channing Gibson have abandoned even the pretense of plausibility: if they can get a laugh with a nitrous oxide gag they'll go for it, however out of character it may be. What's freshest here are the (demographically selected) newcomers. Chris Rock plays a cop trying to keep his marriage to Glover's daughter a secret from the old man, and Hong Kong star Jet Li is the Chinese-triad villain, a smiling devil with the deadliest kung fu kicks in the biz. ""Lethal Weapon'' accomplishes everything it sets out to do, but how you respond to it will depend on whether you find Gibson's Riggs irresistibly endearing or a self-satisfied bully. For me, the series' distinctive mixture of cutesiness and sadism has long since worn out its welcome.

Small Soldiers begins with a premise small kids always find hard to resist: what if your toys came to life? Then it takes it further. What if these war toys--the Commando Elite soldiers led by supermacho Chip Hazard (voice of Tommy Lee Jones)--were somehow implanted with Pentagon microchips? And what if these chips enabled them to wage real war against their enemies the Gorgonites, a gaggle of friendly monsters? Caught in the increasingly dangerous cross-fire are our 15-year-old heroes Alan (Gregory Smith) and Christy (Kirsten Dunst). Some seven writers (four credited) labored over this high-concept tale, not to mention teams of state-of-the-art special-effects craftsmen, but they can't make it fresh. Two ghosts hang over its head--""Toy Story'' and ""Gremlins''--and ""Small Soldiers'' doesn't have the wit, bounce or weirdness of either. The gifted director Joe Dante, who also made ""Gremlins,'' tries hard to invest these plastic protagonists with heart and soul, but the generic story never sinks its hooks into you. There's a memorably creepy sequence in which a battalion of Barbie dolls turned women warriors assault Dunst, but it's not enough to fight off the dulling deja vu. ""Small Soldiers,'' alas, remains a merchandising tie-in in search of a movie.

For one of the summer's most pleasant surprises, check out The Mask of Zorro. Lord knows the masked Mexican swashbuckler has carved his initials in too many movies and TV shows to count, but this spirited rerun, neatly mixing parody and panache, squeezes a surprising amount of fun out of the old war horse. This time we get two Zorros for the price of one. The legendary swordsman, played by Anthony Hopkins with fiery gravitas, must emerge from a 20-year imprisonment to carry out his revenge against the evil Don Montero (Stuart Wilson), who killed Zorro's wife and stole his infant daughter. Hopkins's character trains a new Zorro to assist him--played with a delightful combination of dash and self-deprecating humor by Antonio Banderas. The young Zorro, naturally, falls in love with his teacher's now grown-up daughter (the stunning Catherine Zeta-Jones). Director Martin Campbell knows his way around a formula, never letting the tongue-in-cheek style altogether undermine the romanticism. But it's the playful father-son chemistry between Hopkins and Banderas that really charms. This is one crowd pleaser that actually pleases.

© 1998