Rushes

CLUE

It is probably the first movie ever to be based on a board game. It is certainly the first one to go into the theaters with three different endings. Good news for the makers of some future edition of Trivial Pursuit. The bad news for everyone else is that the colorfully named characters from Clue --Colonel Mustard, Miss Scarlet, Mrs. Peacock et al.--remain flat enough to be stored in a box, and that all three endings are unpersuasive. (If choose you must, opt for Ending C.) Writer-Director Jonathan Lynn apparently felt so obliged to maintain the game's conventions, in which players are invited to solve a mystery of the multiple-murders-in-a-mansion variety, that he allowed himself no time for dialogue or business that rises above the mechanical. Such good performers as Madeline Kahn, Tim Curry, Eileen Brennan and Martin Mull are driven breathless and charmless trying to keep up with the plot's inane demands. To amend a phrase: Who cares who killed Mr. Boddy?

THE JEWEL OF THE NILE

Even for the makers of sequels, there ought to be a more exalted motive than profit. This follow-up to last year's surprise hit Romancing the Stone reunites Stars Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, sends them off to an Arab emirate, then gives them nothing to do but market their charisma. In the first film, Turner intoxicated as a drab novelist who blossomed into a spunky heroine; here, she is fighting only celebrity veg-out. Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner's plot, which amounts to a series of enforced aerobic exertions, matches the two funsters with a cartel of shifty Arabs and a tribe of gullible black Africans. (But my, can they dance!) Every Third World racial cliche is put into the service of derring-do recycled by Director Lewis Teague from Indiana Jones discards. With their cheery imperialist swagger, Douglas and Turner are emissaries of Hollywood's latest foreign policy: Pox Americana.

SPIES LIKE US

More wise-butt Americans abroad. Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd are State Department employees sent to Afghanistan as decoys for a pair of real spies. En route, they brazen their way in and out of scrapes, make poo-poo jokes and just about start World War III. Chase has made a career, if not an art, of strenuous japery like this, but Co-Writer Aykroyd has again neglected to give himself a character to play. So this Road to Armageddon plays more like Crosby and Hopeless. Director John Landis achieves a brisk and funny basic- training sequence, then follows the plot into political irresponsibility. After Hollywood's glut of lame-brained right-wing movies, viewers may welcome a comedy that portrays American military intelligence as a contradiction in terms. But even conspiracy buffs deserve better than this. So do lovers of lowball farce.