ONE DUMB SUMMER

By RICHARD CORLISS

Hollywood rules. Moviegoers in almost every foreign country prefer American films to their own. They love our action pictures, with their size and tempo and assurance, and all those pretty people realizing outrageous dreams. Our directors know how to fulfill Alfred Hitchcock's aim: to make the Japanese audience scream at the same time as the American audience. Perhaps they know it too well. A manic roteness now envelops action films; the need to thrill has become a drab addiction. Isn't there more to moviemaking than having your finger on the pulse of the world public? Can't the megalo-melodrama be infused with passion and ingenuity? The answer so far, and with just one exception, is no--not this season. For this is the Summer of Dumb.

Maybe this is not new. Some years back, a film critic observed that the problem with summer pictures wasn't that they were bad movies; it was that they were the same bad movie. But more than ever this summer, with the moguls at the sausage factories sending out a new slice of action salami each week--The Lost World: Jurassic Park, followed by Con Air, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Batman & Robin, Face/Off and Men in Black--the big films look like instant remakes, retreads or reductios ad absurdum of last Friday's film, which wasn't all that hot either. Some of the movies have incidental felicities, and, to abort all suspense right now, Face/Off is damn fine. But in sum, these films offer evidence that the action-adventure has reached a point of exhaustion. Seen as one 12-hour epic, this multiplex six-pack moves less on cruise control than on automatic pilot. This is zombie entertainment: cinema with motor skills but a dead brain.

At the end of a genre cycle, directors jettison character and story for bustle and special effects--noise and toys. Here are four reasons movies aren't better.

SMALL MINDS THINK ALIKE. It's as if Hollywood had just one huge brainstorming session for all its summer movies. Someone says, "I took a boat ride last week. Let's have a climactic boat chase." Speed 2 ends with one, and so, for no maritime reason, does Face/Off.

Somebody else says, "How about if we have a kid seeing something really scary out a second-story window, but his parents don't believe him, and then the scary thing does its dirty work?" Swell: a dinosaur in The Lost World, a runaway cruise ship in Speed 2.

A third guy looks up from his PC and says, "Computers!" So half of the pictures either have someone laboriously logging on or, as in Speed 2, hand the villain a Mighty Morphin PowerBook as his tool of terror.

A fourth guy says, "All movies are comic books these days. Let's do more movies based on comic books!" Not just Batman & Robin and Men in Black but also two August releases, Spawn and Steel, are comic book-inspired. This junk-culture trend must please the kids in the Development departments; no more novels to read, with all those annoying words.

CLUELESSNESS. Melodrama at its best involves a conflict between intelligent good and cunning evil. But it's easier just to have smart people do dumb things. The noble intentions of The Lost World's team of scientists--trying to protect the dinosaurs from a group of rapacious hunters--are undercut by some laughably inane fieldwork. They take close-up photos of the beasts with incredibly noisy cameras that are bound to startle any dino into a frenzy; they kidnap a T. rex baby to mend its leg while Big Mama prowls closer. It's knaves vs. fools in the Jurassic jungle.

For all its special-effects frissons, Steven Spielberg's sequel lacks the shock of the new; it has the familiarity of a child's second trip to Disneyland. Its formula heroes (American) and villains (European) aren't a hindrance; after all, this is a monster movie. But what about the dinosaurs? Though they ooze attitude, they have no specific character. Viewers were moved by the lovelorn King Kong, and appreciated the creature's maternal rage in Aliens; but the Lost World beasts are just big, undifferentiated lizards. Memo for the inevitable Jurassic 3: try creating a dinosaur with star quality--with a personality, a grudge or a heart.

But Hollywood hardly knows what to do with its human stars. Sandra Bullock became one as the resourceful bus driver of Speed, yet in the sequel she can only squeal, hide and get kidnapped, while no-voltage Jason Patric attends to all the heavy heroics. In Batman & Robin the guest villains are Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze. Thurman has sexy fun with her villainous eco-freak, but Arnold is encased in an icy truss of a costume that obscures his rippling charisma. Memo to the Batman team: next time you pay a star $25 million, let us see him.

BRUTALITY. What they lose in personality, they make up in body count. In these sociopathic action films, the hero has a bad case of blood lust. The psychos, like the Steve Buscemi serial killer in Con Air, are comic, sympathetic sorts. And anyone who's not a major character is called for icing by Mr. Freeze, or blithely sideswiped by Speed 2's Bullock during the most deplorable driving-test scene in film history. Something is wrong with Hollywood if the answer to every story problem is a crash. Even the otherwise canny Disney cartoon Hercules has an isn't-it-funny-that-a-whole-Greek-marketplace-falls-down scene.

Male movie stars didn't always have to act like commandos to assert their machismo. How many bad guys did Clark Gable or Cary Grant kill in their careers as Hollywood heroes? Precious few, because life--even a villain's life--was held more precious then. Maybe the old movies were naive, but we'll take naivete over the thoughtless, numberless carnage that makes the modern action film a Bosnia for fun and profit.

FACETIOUSNESS. Jokiness is the current handmaiden of brutality. Violent death provides the punch line for the two-hour string of gags that is the modern action movie. And when the stars aren't killing off the supporting players, they are cracking wise--lamely. All right, nobody goes to hear an action movie, but the verbal humor in The Lost World didn't have to be so stilted. In Con Air and Batman & Robin the lines have the rhythm of wit but not the content; they are their own rim shots.

At least Men in Black is a comedy--a fact that may surprise and disappoint the zillions who expect it to be this Independence Day's answer to last year's Independence Day. Director Barry Sonnenfeld (The Addams Family, Get Shorty) is just the chef to blend comedy and creepiness, as is writer Ed Solomon (It's Garry Shandling's Show, the Bill & Ted adventures). Early on, they do right by Lowell Cunningham's comic-book premise: that extraterrestrials have landed, that they are a scuzzy lot who deserve to be treated like illegal aliens and that the government has an elite corps of FBI-style agents (notably Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones) to keep them in line. Ah, this explains everything: Velcro, liposuction, the microwave oven and why the 1964 World's Fair was held in Queens.

This mad, mad world is inventively drawn; Smith and Jones make a finely mismatched pair. But, as in many comedies, all the good stuff is in Act I. So much energy is spent on the premise that little is left for the payoff. Men in Black suffocates from the facetiousness that gave it life, and the movie ends up less like Independence Day than like the hectic Mars Attacks!

Action movies don't have to fail. The Fugitive, The Rock, The Long Kiss Goodnight satisfy the dramatic unities while kicking beaucoup butt. And sometimes a gifted director can go beyond the conventional pleasures. With Face/Off, John Woo, the Hong Kong auteur (The Killer, Hard Boiled), has made his smartest, wildest, positively Woo-siest American thriller. Working from a vigorous script by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, Woo weaves his familiar touches--the slo-mo, the gleaming candles, the long coats flying in the breeze, the doves flying in a chapel as an omen of death--around the central fantasy of male bonding gone berserk.

Sean Archer (John Travolta) is an FBI agent determined to nail Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage), the terrorist who killed Sean's young son. He does so, apparently killing Castor. In order to find a bomb that...oh, never mind; it's too weird. Just know that Sean has Castor's face sewn on him. And then a revived Castor puts on Sean's face. The men are trapped in the personalities of their worst enemies.

For once, a movie knows how to use its stars. That's important, because, on one level, Face/Off is a comedy about acting--Really Big Acting. Cage, who must have been taking Christopher Walken lessons, is spooky-nuts as Castor, then wonderfully poignant as Sean. And Travolta, after shucking his dour FBI persona, shows a gaily dangerous side as Castor. He's a charming, reckless slime.

As the actors go bigger, so does the film; it's the most delirious major-studio melodrama since Natural Born Killers. But it's also dead serious--because Woo has restored moral gravity to acts of violence. This isn't just a thrill ride; it's a rocket into the thrilling past, when directors could scare you with how much emotion they packed into a movie.

Studios would be wise to lure more foreign directors like Woo, who knows how to transform summer's dumb-and-dumber product into a gnarly, white-knuckle action film for all seasons.