 • Write your own review • Back to main page ![[]](http://img.coxnewsweb.com/B/06/93/06/image_6936.gif){kind=small} Weak premise. Lagging plot. Stale jokes. This sequel has major issues.
By John DeFore Special to the Austin American-Statesman Posted: December 5, 2002 "Analyze This" was one of those too-frequent instances in which a movie sounds much funnier than it actually is. The premise -- a mafia boss starts seeing a psychiatrist, then becomes dependent on his advice -- overlapped nicely with the explosive popularity of "The Sopranos," and the casting got audiences in the door. What unspooled once they were there wasn't hilarious, but it was likable enough to make some money, and these days that modest accomplishment is all Hollywood needs to justify turning a film into a series. What mild charms the first film held have evaporated in the three intervening years. The staleness is uncomfortably clear in one of the opening scenes of the sequel, "Analyze That," in which Billy Crystal and Lisa Kudrow bicker after Crystal's father's funeral. In the first film, Kudrow played a bride-to-be whose wedding was spoiled by a gangster; in that situation, her consternation was funny, but as a wife who can't sympathize with her husband's life-threatening dilemma (a gangster is stalking him long-distance), she's a good deal less entertaining. In this scene and a couple of other early ones, the filmmakers found some lines so funny that they left gaps in the dialogue to allow for the audience's laughter to die down; at the advance Austin screening this week, many of those moments passed without a single giggle from the crowd. It's not all this bad, fortunately. Even when they're not at their best, it's difficult to be too angry at such enjoyable actors as Robert De Niro and Crystal, and the story moves along at an acceptable pace. De Niro's Paul Vitti, who has adjusted well to prison life, is suddenly the target of assassination attempts. Needing to get out of jail, he feigns insanity by spending three days singing tunes from "West Side Story" (this is not a pleasant sight). In a development that stretches plausibility even by comedic standards, the Justice Department decides to release Vitti into the personal custody of Dr. Ben Sobol (Crystal), who must house and feed the former mob boss until he's "sane, sober and legally employed." That's a big stretch, but there are bigger ones to come, like the filmmakers' insistence on a too-serious psychological subplot running through the film. Sobol's domineering father has just died, and this has inspired him to question his life's path. The shrink is going a little crazy, popping pills and becoming a public embarrassment, and he invariably excuses his outbursts with the quip, "I'm grieving; it's a process." That's meant to get funnier through repetition, but it just serves to remind you how unaffecting these father issues (Vitti has them, too) are. Director Harold Ramis blended comedy with semiserious emotional lessons wonderfully in "Groundhog Day," and has seemed for the last decade to be trying to repeat that success; each failed attempt just makes the earlier film look like a fluke. This is a blah sequel to a so-so movie; the characters were limited in the first place, and here they barely do more than recycle the gags and mannerisms that made them amusing before. (See De Niro doing his "You -- you're good, you -- no, you're really good" speech for the umpteenth time.) But it's a shame to see a few promising ideas introduced (like a jab at "The Sopranos," in which Vitti is hired as a consultant on a ridiculous mafia TV series) only to play out lifelessly. Unfortunately, that seems to be the story of De Niro's life when it comes to comedies. | |||||||
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