Paging Doc Jollygood

By RICHARD CORLISS

Men! Sweaty, hairy things! They think every problem can be solved with either fists or power tools, and they don't know how to shop, cook or listen. In so many modern movies, a guy is a goon with a grudge, a hyperactive child on steroids. The summer blockbusters show how he can die hard or douse a forest fire or terminate the bad guys. But he still needs educating, humanizing. Why, with a woman's touch, a man can be a mensch -- warm, winsome, wonderful, wuvable and all those other sweet w adjectives. Also, in Hollywood's late-summer films, way too wimpy.

For the men who run the movies, these dog days are a time of atonement. Out go the slam-bang gonadal giants of June and July; in come a passel of fellows on their onerous journey toward becoming more sensitive souls. They take their cue from Harrison Ford, the selfish lawyer in Regarding Henry, who gets a shot in the head and suddenly feels so darned . . . human. But the newer films go a step farther. In Doc Hollywood and The Doctor, the ones in need of redemption are good guys.

Doctors, even. At the start of both films, the physicians are Doc Jollygoods -- more than capable at their life-and-death jobs, if a bit on the prima donna side. They hardly seem in need of comeuppance, but they get it. In Doc Hollywood, an ambitious young man (Michael J. Fox) with plans to become a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon gets stuck in a small Southern town and soon learns how shallow are his dreams of wealth, prestige and comfort. In The Doctor, a heart surgeon (William Hurt) contracts throat cancer and finds he must endure the impersonal hospital "care" he has administered so blithely.

The two leads are not the problem; they illuminate their roles. Fox, an icon of sunny impudence, plays a blend of his two most famous roles: the sassy kid from Family Ties and the cherubic go-getter in the Back to the Future trilogy. And Hurt, Hollywood's white-collar star, mines wit and pain from a static character. The actor can get wondrously glum when he plays a smart guy flummoxed by fate, which is why he should have been cast as the hero-victims in Presumed Innocent and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Instead he got The Doctor, whose style -- earnest and low key, with a dash of irony -- complements Hurt's.

But Doc Hollywood comes down with a long siege of the cutes, languishing in the Brigadoon innocence of its cheerful folkways. And The Doctor, after a good hour or so, goes all dithery -- devoutly Californian -- as Hurt discovers the meaning of life by dancing in the desert with a terminally ill patient (Elizabeth Perkins). He resolves to support another patient's rightful claim in a malpractice suit. This redemptive ploy, also used in Regarding Henry, must be Hollywood's new prescription for wellness: to atone for one's success.

Both doctors are upscale variations on the standard family man of sitcoms -- the genial brute who must be taught some socializing lesson by the end of the half hour (and who will forget it before next week's show). Hurt and Fox must be purged of their aggressiveness, their flippancy, their maleness. Kings in their operating room, they must become serfs in the benign dictatorship of Nice. If this emotional brainwashing is redemption, then give us hell. These movies are hot-air balloons that deserve to be punctured -- preferably with a Black & Decker power drill.