TWISTED WIRE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

He will organize a merry game of porno Password with your parents, supply you with a prostitute when you're horny, beat up a rival trying to make time with your estranged girlfriend. Beware the cable guy bearing gifts. Indeed, beware anyone emerging out of the hostile anonymity of modern city life who is too anxious to assuage your anomie. If bitter experience has taught our paranoia anything, it's that excesses of accommodation are all too often aggression's most winsome disguise.

There's a good, crystallizing movie to be made out of that thought. But The Cable Guy is not it, mostly because its pathology is more schizophrenic than paranoid, knockabout one minute, knockover the next. In a way, that suits Jim Carrey's comic genius, with its eerie blend of sublime self-confidence and anarchical menace. To see him, as the eponymous electronics installer, engage in passionate foreplay with a wall, seeking its perfect cable G-spot, then drill into it in rapacious fury, is to be transported to a realm of exquisitely mixed light and dark. Like Matthew Broderick, as the customer watching this performance, fearful and fascinated, we have no choice but to let him further into our lives.

But screenwriter Lou Holtz Jr. can't just rest there. He must turn the cable guy into a victim of TV addiction--all he knows about life he learned as a neglected child parked in front of the tube. When its stupid pieties don't work in real life, he embraces its other method of problem solving: violence. Hard even for Carrey to riff under that weight; his director, Ben Stiller, is more awed than helpful. Aiming, perhaps, for a neat double helix of black humor and prankishness, they've ended up with a pretty ugly granny knot.

--By Richard Schickel