Meatless Friday

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

He clips his words in the same brusque spirit his barber clips his crew cut. He wears a suit he must have found at a time warp's going-out-of-business sale, smokes unfiltered cigarettes and eats chili dogs as if there were no radicchio. He believes in virginity, the 55-m.p.h. speed limit and that old- time religion. Welcome back, Sergeant Joe Friday.

Well, not the Joe Friday, Jack Webb's immortally stylized police professional, but rather old Joe's nephew, encased in the comical form of Dan Aykroyd. A true inheritor of the manners and morals of the '50s, he is a cop whose unhappy lot is to protect and serve the Los Angeles of the 1980s. To him, that is roughly equivalent to working the night watch out of Gomorrah.

Aykroyd's Friday is a smart parody and often a sharp instrument for social satire. Tom Hanks is not so lucky: he must represent relativistic contemporary values to Friday. It is simply not a fair fight. And both of them are overwhelmed by a story that unlike the old Dragnet TV plots, which were neat little slices of lowlife, is a mess of municipal corruption, pornography and religious-cult nonsense. As a result, the LAPD in this picture finally looks like a wholly owned subsidiary of the Beverly Hills cops. R.S.