MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Going Undercover’--the Gags, Ideas Get Lost in the Chase

Perhaps critics waste too much time slamming slick, vacuous movies. After, all there’s something to be said for them: at least they’re slick. In the helter-skelter, dunderheaded new chase comedy, “Going Undercover” (citywide) the only slim salvation might be empty professionalism--and it keeps fluffing the opportunity. It’s about as slick as a beer-stained horsehair sofa being carried along by a drunken camel.

In it, an amiably inept young L.A. private eye (Chris Lemmon)--a slumming rich kid who can’t pay his rent and wears a silly hat--is hired by a sneering socialite and scientist’s wife (Jean Simmons) to shadow her contemptuous daughter (Lea Thompson) on a European tour. Once everybody hits Copenhagen, all hell breaks loose. Lechers and spies dog Lea’s pert steps, flirting, car-chasing and kidnaping with wild abandon.

Writer-director James Kenelm Clarke has an idea that might have worked--a Hitchcockian yuppie sex comedy--and he’s hired actors and a cinematographer (John Coquillon) who might have brought it off. But rarely has any film maker made his collaborators look so bad. “Going Undercover” almost seems like the result of a mutiny. And if there wasn’t a mutiny, maybe there should have been.

This is another VCR mix-and-match special. We begin with the social context of “The Graduate”--spiced briefly with Jewel Shephard’s sexpot wriggling--mixed up with a parody of “The Big Sleep” and “Chinatown,” and laced with bad heavy metal gags and mistimed slapstick. Then we’re plunged into a horrible blend of would-be Hitchcock pastiche and “me” generation sex humor, complete with handcuffed “39 Steps”-style lovers and a climax on an out-of-control roller-coaster, where the bad guys keep getting their heads banged on the tunnels.

The low point occurs in the inevitable car chase, when the driver turns out to be a deranged Danish cabbie and film buff, rattling off the names of all his favorite car chase scenes of the past--” ’Bullitt!’ 1968! Peter Yates! ‘Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry!’ 1974! Johnny Hough!”--perhaps to distract us from the excruciating sloppiness of this one.

It’s nice to see Jean Simmons again, though certainly not in this. And Chris Lemmon is an engaging young actor who amusingly recycles a lot of his dad Jack’s mannerisms--the sputtering backtrack, the sudden gulp and swiveling take, the high-pitched racing whine quickly clipped off--on a lot of lines you wouldn’t have wished on the Ritz Brothers. “Going Undercover” (MPAA-rated PG-13, for lewd situations and language) does have one distinction: probably the all-time worst tailing-the-transvestite movie gag sequence. (“ ‘Going Undercover!’ 1988! Jimmy Clarke!”)