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'Analyze That' fails to duplicate comic success of predecessor
Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro reprise their roles in 'Analyze That'
Warner Bros.
Earlier this year in "Showtime," Robert De Niro played an irascible cop unhappily assigned as creative consultant, or technical adviser, to a TV show called "Showtime," a "Cops" ripoff.
In "Analyze That," he's a major mobster whose rehabilitation includes being creative consultant to a TV show called "Little Caesar" that stars an Australian-Italian actor played in an unbilled cameo by Australian-born Anthony LaPaglia.
"There's a lot of us paisans Down Under," says the LaPaglia character in one of "That's" few flirtations with credibility.
De Niro reprises his once-funny portrayal of Paul Vitti, a crime boss who has been in Sing Sing for more than two years. Suddenly, he's fending off assassination attempts.
Feigning a nervous breakdown by badly singing songs from "West Side Story" for three days, Paul improbably gets himself sprung — call it a conditional release — into the in-home custody of his unwelcoming psychotherapist, Ben Sobel (Billy Crystal).
Even unhappier than Ben with the arrangement is his wife, Laura (Lisa Kudrow with third billing for a minor supporting role).
Paul is willing to go straight, but hostility issues impair his tryouts as an Audi dealer, a maitre d' and a jewelry salesman, which, with him inexplicably still free, leads to "Little Caesar" consultation.
Warring mob families want him wasted. And so he begins dodging Patti LoPresti (Cathy Moriarty-Gentile), who took over his gang, and Louis "The Wrench" Rigozzi (Frank Gio).
About the only stand-up guy Paul can count on is sidekick Jelly (Joe Viterelli).
The screenplay by Peter Steinfeld, Peter Tolan and Harold Ramis places little emphasis this time on Paul's psychotherapy, possibly because a parallel plotline in the ongoing HBO series "The Sopranos," which also started in 1999, has drawn on many of the possibilities and diminished the novelty.
Neither do the screenwriters, nor Ramis in his capacity as director, figure out how to make more of the casting of Moriarty-Gentile as De Niro's — that is, Paul's — formidable successor.
When the performers teamed 22 years ago as spouses Jake and Vickie LaMotta in "Raging Bull," the sexual and violent tension between them exceeded anything between screen couples to date.
"Analyze That" has a few laughs, but too few to compensate for the abundance of talent all too obviously marking time waiting for inspired scenes they never get.
No one who likes the half-dozen key players, and there are a lot of us, will want to skip the opportunity to watch them interact again in a context that played so amusingly the first time.
Nor is anyone likely to leave "Analyze That" encouraging the production of an "Analyze One More Thing."
| 'Analyze That' |
Director: Harold Ramis
Stars: Robert De Niro, Billy Crystal, Joe Viterelli
Where: R, for language and some sexual content
