MOVIE REVIEW : THIS ‘JACK’S’ FLASH IS ONE BIG WHOOPI

If “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (selected theaters) proves anything, it’s that its star, Whoopi Goldberg, is an absolute movie natural: She can shine in the most ragged circumstances.

In her debut film, “The Color Purple,” surrounded by Steven Spielberg’s improbably sumptuous vision of Southern black farm life, Goldberg had an almost fairy-tale impishness. Her cheeky-tweaky, sneaky-mean little smile gave the whole movie an antic spirit, cutting through the occasional sub-Norman Rockwell tableaux with a shot of funk.

Similarly, in a smaller, lesser arena, she makes “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” seem a lot hipper than it really is, revving it up past its meager potential. It’s basically an attempt at a pure escapist movie for the baby-boom generation: a fun thriller, laced with mild gags, mild irreverence, mild satire. The whole movie has a tamed feel, like a “Saturday Night Live” episode intended for Saturday morning. If there’s a gentle nudge at President Reagan under the credits (a bumbling, unnamed President who muffs facts and thinks Hawaii is “our staunchest ally”) then it’s balanced by an apple-cheeked CIA agent who shows up later. The movie’s irreverence is safe--until Goldberg herself begins colliding against it, jangling it up. She carries it beyond the aura of iconoclasm-by-committee.

She plays a computer whiz named Terry Doolittle, working in a Manhattan bank that deals heavily in international money transfers. Terry is a raffish eccentric: regaling her correspondents with jivey, earthy chitchat, among rows of computer-desks that suggest a slightly flipped-out college language class. She’s a little like the combat surgeons in “M.A.S.H.”: so good at her job, she can get away with furious displays of independence--though here the rebellion mainly involves twitting her badly toupeed boss and cluttering up her desk with a menagerie of toy dinosaurs.

Bored, Terry accidentally taps into an anonymous caller who signs himself “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”: a British intelligence agent trapped somewhere in the Eastern bloc. They share a sensibility (after all, they’re both Rolling Stones fans), though their only link is the computer’s fragile electronic web. Trying to crack his codes, and help rescue him, she stumbles into a zoo of espionage: all those stylized, comic-sinister international villains we’ve been seeing since “Charade.” (In this case, amusingly played by people like John Wood, Roscoe Lee Browne, Jeroen Krabbe and Jim Belushi.)

When “Jack Flash” begins, it has a jumpy energy that seems to bode well, and it’s so keyed around Whoopi Goldberg that you have a sense she can carry it anywhere she wants. But, even though the squadron of writers supplies a blizzard of opening wisecracks, only a few of them really connect.

The best scenes are usually the simplest: the computer conversations between Terry and Jack (voice supplied by Jonathan Pryce, of “Brazil”). Terry has a salty, free-associating ramble; Jack, a plaintive edge of desperation--and their interaction is delightful. But when the movie goes into its thriller-chiller routines, it gets obvious and strained. It’s hard to accept Terry’s gameness about clambering all over rooftops, or heading to the Hudson River docks alone after midnight--or her strange propensity for leaving doors open whenever villains are lurking nearby. (A subconscious death wish?) It’s even hard to figure why she shows up at the British Consulate soiree in a blond semi-Tina Turner wig, and then does Diana Ross imitations. (Were the wigs mixed?)

Worst of all is the episode in which Terry, making a phone-booth call, is hijacked, booth and all, by the villains--who just happen to be driving by in a tow-away truck. This is really the last gasp of super-stunt movie slapstick. It makes no sense at all. (What are the villains doing in a tow-away truck? Did they actually plan all this?)

First-time feature director Penny Marshall--who took over after the original shooting was interrupted--shows promise. She hasn’t really made “Jack” jell or given it the right rhythm--and too many of the supporting actresses come across like Edith Bunker’s demented nieces--but she has some personality and zip. It’s Whoopi Goldberg, however, who gives you something extraordinary. At the center of all this formula tongue-in-cheek thriller pablum, she keeps sending out weird curves and bent splinters of off-center energy. She’s a remarkably empathic actress, and you only hope she’ll get a few vehicles that push her to the limit. ‘JUMPIN’ JACK FLASH’

A Twentieth Century Fox presentation of a Lawrence Gordon/Silver Pictures Production. Producers Lawrence Gordon, Joel Silver. Director Penny Marshall. Script David H. Franzoni, J W. Melville, Patricia Irving, Christopher Thompson. Camera Matthew F. Leonetti. Production design Robert Boyle. Editor Mark Goldblatt. Music Thomas Newman. With Whoopi Goldberg, Stephen Collins, John Wood, Carol Kane, Annie Potts, Peter Michael Goetz, Jeroen Krabbe, Jonathan Pryce, Jim Belushi.

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).