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** “Slamdance.” Key. $79.98.

“Slamdance” has a great look--vibrantly colorful, sharply contemporary--but often it seems to be dead behind the eyes. Director Wayne Wang (“Chan Is Missing”), a specialist in cross-cultural humor, here has barely any cultures to cross. He and his collaborators create a city of hip anachronisms, ephemera, metallic shimmer, rot under neon. But their archetypal plot--with a New Wave cartoonist (Tom Hulce) pulled by a blonde temptress (Virginia Madsen) into a hell of good and bad cops and psychotic hit men--is less a film noir design than a film noir decal, a papery paranoid thriller in a minimalist vein.

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