MOVIE REVIEW : ‘REAL GENIUS’: SATIRE WITH A HIGH IQ

By golly, “Real Genius” (citywide) lives up to its title.

It’s a brisk, smart satirical comedy from the writers of “Police Academy” and the director of “Valley Girl,” set in a Caltech-like institution for the whiz kids of the sciences. How refreshing it is to see young people depicted as having a capacity for thought as well as emotion.

The business at hand for the students of up-tight professor William Atherton (who’s also the unctuous host of a TV science show called “Everything”) is to come up with a five-megawatt laser beam against a very tight deadline. Among Atherton’s pupils are laid-back prankster Val Kilmer, who after three years has learned that kidding around is essential to preserving his sanity. His new roommate is an eager-to-please 15-year-old (Gabe Jarret) whose IQ may be 20 points higher than Kilmer’s, yet who’s even more innocent than most of his contemporaries.

Buckling down to work, Kilmer and Jarret become so caught up in the project that they’re transfixed when Jonathan Gries, the institute’s one-time star but now a burned-out case, asks them if they’ve ever wondered about the purpose of such a powerful laser.

For reasons not clear, writers Neal Israel and Pat Proft, joined this time out by “WKRP in Cincinatti” alumnus Peter Torokvei, have tipped us off to what nefarious ends Atherton is exploiting his students. This robs the film of suspense, since it’s manifestly obvious that virtue must triumph. Yet so inspired is the film’s humor and so pertinent its criticism of dangerously close ties between university research and the demands of the military-industrial complex that it plays well anyway. The crisp direction is by Martha Coolidge, who makes these young people as believable and involving as those in “Valley Girls.”

“Real Genius” (rated PG for some mildly raunchy dialogue) may stress a bit heavily that its brilliant students are basically normal guys, but it does convince us that they’re really as smart as we’re told.

Kilmer, Jarret and Gries could scarcely be better, nor could scene-stealing Robert Prescott as a smarmy tattle-tale and saboteur of his classmates’ work. Atherton is a deliciously comic figure of ruthless, pompous academic opportunism, and Michelle Meyrink is irresistible as a sweetly hyperkinetic teen-ager astounded to discover that Jarret is attracted to her. (So intense is she that within a day of meeting him she’s knitted him a sweater!)

There are laughs amid serious implications, a high level of inventiveness and a thicket of scientific nomenclature you need not worry about comprehending. Wayne Fitzgerald’s opening title sequence, employing a swift illustrated history of weapons from the Stone Age to the present and accompanied by Carmen MacRae singing “You Took Advantage of Me,” neatly sets up all that is to follow. One puzzle: How is it that Coolidge let the school be presented as an almost entirely all-male institution?

‘REAL GENIUS’

A Tri-Star presentation. Executive producer Robert Daley. Producer Brian Grazer. Director Martha Coolidge. Screenplay Neal Israel & Pat Proft, Peter Torokvei; story by Israel & Proft. Camera Vilmos Zsigmond. Music Thomas Newman. Production designer Josan F. Russo. Associate producer Sam Crespi-Horowitz. Second-unit camera Frederick Elmes. Sound design George Budd. Special effects coordinator Philip C. Cory. Stunt coordinator Ed Ulrich. Laser technology designer Ron Cobb. Film editor Richard Chew. With Val Kilmer, Gabe Jarret, Michelle Meyrink, William Atherton, Jonathan Gries, Robert Prescott, Patti D’Arbanville, Ed Lauter.

Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG (parental guidance suggested; some material may not be suitable for children).