A Funny, Fantastic Voyage INNERSPACE

By RICHARD CORLISS

Hollywood is happy again. A lot of summer films are making big money; each June weekend brought a new box-office champ. Beverly Hills Cop II, then Predator, then The Witches of Eastwick, then Dragnet. Half a dozen other films are silly-season successes. And so the industry, even as it fretted about a strike threatened by the Directors Guild, entered July with high hopes for the best summer since Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Gremlins made the wickets blister in 1984.

Will Innerspace, the new comedy-fantasy directed by Joe Dante (Gremlins) and "presented" by Steven Spielberg (Indiana Jones), join the parade of winners? Or even surpass them? It ought to. It's the summer's best "summer movie." This is a film with something -- indeed, too funny much -- for everybody. A sci-fi thriller in which one brave man is miniaturized to the size of a mote and takes a fantastic voyage into another man's buttock. A buddy picture in which both buddies occupy the same body. A classic romance of two men in love with the same girl, and somehow all three kiss at once. And just when you think the movie will provide some familiar gags and gasps, it introduces yet another pretzel plot twist. By the end, you should be working so hard to keep up with Innerspace that you've earned the happiest of headaches.

Try following this plot. Lieut. Tuck Pendelton (Dennis Quaid), a right- stuff pilot, volunteers for a Silicon Valley experiment in which he will be placed in a space capsule, miniaturized and inserted into a rabbit's body. But rival scientists invade the lab, and tiny Tuck is injected into the body of Jack Putter (Martin Short), a wimpy Safeway clerk. Before Tuck's oxygen supply runs out -- at 9 tomorrow morning -- Jack must find the courage and smarts to escape from a speeding truck, undergo a frightening face-lifting, steal a vital microchip, fight off a couple of midget dastards and win the confidence of Tuck's skeptical girlfriend (Meg Ryan). If Tuck has anything to do with it, Jack will find all the resources he needs right inside him. And his arrogant little friend, who is fond of gazing in the mirror and saying, "The Tuck Pendelton machine -- zero defects," may learn how to be a mensch.

It is the standard give-and-get of movie fiction: two men of polar-opposite dispositions share their strengths and become one indomitable hero. Tuck gives Jack guts; Jack gives Tuck humanity. The old switcheroo has a nice impact, but the film's most intelligent pleasures come from the filigree work. Dante packs his movie as if it were the knapsack of a ten-year-old running away from home -- with comic-book notions, weird windup toys and a quartet of villains as grotesquely giddy as the Garbage Pail Kids.

In establishing motives and motifs, Dante goes productively crazy. Is Tuck to be stuck in a rabbit? Then there will be hares everywhere: mechanical bunnies in Tuck's apartment; a project leader named Ozzie, for Oswald the Rabbit; a cameo turn by Chuck Jones, the cartoon auteur who developed Bugs Bunny. Is the plot conflict as pure as an archetypal Western shoot-out? Then one bad guy, the Cowboy (Robert Picardo), will twirl his hair dryer like a six-shooter while he sings I'm an Old Cowhand; and another, the thug-chauffeur Igoe (Vernon Wells), will shoot a man through the gloved finger of his steel hand and then, to impress a gawking boy, blow smoke from the glove's ruptured finger. Is the movie gaily influenced by old Howard Hawks, Roger Corman and even Jerry Lewis films? Then Dante will cast veteran actors identified with those directors.

Indeed, Innerspace plays as if it were the hippest Martin-and-Lewis comedy. Tuck is the boozer-crooner-loverboy; Jack is the engaging, zany nerd. Both actors have nifty fun updating these roles. Quaid, flashing the satanic grin patented by Jack Nicholson, ensures that Tuck makes a convincing connection with a friend he cannot embrace until the end of the movie. And Short, late of SCTV and Saturday Night Live, is one deft darling. Jack begins as a wild paranoiac but soon straightens up and loosens up, especially in a maniacal boogie he performs to Sam Cooke's Twistin' the Night Away. If this number doesn't win Short an Oscar, it should at least cop him second prize on Dance Fever. The scene is one more gift from Dante's pinata of a movie.

The Innerspace machine. Zero defects. Strap yourself inside it, blast off and have a great time.