MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Deadly Illusion’: Spoof Lacks a Style Signature

“Deadly Illusion” (citywide) is a twisty little private-eye thriller--an obvious homage to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane and company--and it plays most of the way with serpentine tongue firmly in hard-boiled cheek.

Vicious murders and gentle spoofery make the mood here. Why else would a writer, Larry Cohen in this case, give his sleuth (Billy Dee Williams) a name like Hamberger, and have him constantly ward off wisecracks about it? Or have his office set up in a local delicatessen? Or put him on a case that features high fashion, drugs, double identities, a fistfight on the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and a shoot-out at Shea Stadium?

Cohen obviously had fun working out all these little riffs. He’s a quirky writer-director, and he’s best when his projects are shaggy, bent explorations of paranoid genre movie themes(“God Told Me To,” “Q” or “The Stuff”). But, though Cohen shares directorial credit here with William Tannen (“Flashpoint”), only the opening gunfight smacks of his usual style.

Much of the movie is done in such a desultory, low-pressure, matter-of-fact way that Cohen’s crazier inspirations seem mired in Super Glue. This is an enervated thriller with a lean budget--which means minimal car-chase carnage--and it needs a baroque, energetic, vaguely demented-looking style to bring it off.

If there’s a glue that holds all this slackly staged nuttiness together, it’s Billy Dee Williams. He gives a charmingly low-key performance as Hamberger. Williams gives him a self-effacing but slightly cocky humanity that makes him an interesting action hero. He radiates grown-up mischievousness and, like Bogart, looks as if he could rely on his wits more than his fists.

Not that his wits have anything particularly witty to unravel. In “Deadly Illusion” (MPAA rated: R for sex and language), Vanity is a vacuous, petulant heroine, and Morgan Fairchild a formula villainess--all brittle hair and shrieking eye shadow. A bigger sexual spark is triggered by a bit player, Julie Gordon, as Fairchild’s receptionist.

Joe Cortese makes a pretty good cop-antagonist-buddy, but the villains are mostly of the Gucci-suit-and-a-gun variety. It’s a pity, because this could have been an entertaining little action thriller. As it is, the illusions are deadlier than the movie.