MOVIE REVIEW : Hoskins and Washington: Buddies With a Lot of ‘Heart’

High concepts can be like badly wired explosives. They’re supposed to be the engines driving a movie up into the skies, but sometimes they’re more like bombs ticking away in the hold. Luckily, “Heart Condition” (citywide), slips out of most of the traps built into its own gimmick: a goofy-sounding notion about a racist haunted by his black heart transplant donor.

This buddy-from-beyond marketing hook may seem like an albatross, but the stars--Bob Hoskins as Jack Moony and Denzel Washington as ghost Napoleon Stone--pry it loose. Separately, they’ve always been scene-stealers. Together, they’re practically a syndicate.

In the film, Hoskins’ Moony is a hot-tempered, bigoted cop. Felled by a heart attack after a lifetime of junk food, tantrums and dangerous exertions, he’s given the transplanted pump of Washington’s Stone, an Armani-suited slickster of a lawyer who used to defend the hookers Hoskins collared. Moony gets more than his heart. The ghost of Stone suddenly appears before him--but nobody else--admonishing him away from greasy cheeseburgers, giving him a sartorial make-over, guiding his love life, educating him in cool and couth, transforming him from bigot to buddy and, finally, teaming up with him to track down Stone’s own killer.

Like most male-bonding action movies, “Heart Condition” suggests that these feuding comrades make up one integrated personality. Here, they’re even in love with the same woman: Chloe Webb as a hooker-in-distress, Crystal. And they have the same nemesis, Jeffrey Meek as Graham, Crystal’s boss, a sleek pimp who wants no spots on his Maserati.

The premise may seem sappy or dubious to the end, but the teamwork clicks. Hoskins is a titan of frustration, rage and lightly leashed passion. Like Danny DeVito, he’s a little stocky guy with gigantic emotions tearing their way loose--and when directors fling him into a scene, he’s like a Birmingham grenade with the pin pulled. Scenes revolve around him; worlds quiver around him. Washington, on the other hand, has such a silky touch--even when he’s playing psychopaths or hard guys--that he seems to iron out all the kinks in the air. Washington cools everything out. He’s a smoothie and Hoskins is a tornado.

In “Heart Condition,” writer-director James Parriott plays up these contrasts. He keeps comically colliding the densely detailed worlds of the twosome: the amiable, cat-littered mess in which Moony lives and the pricey Century City environs and chichi hangouts of Stone. And there’s such sly mischief and high class hip in Washington’s performance that we can see why he enrages Moony; the cop’s bigotry is also permeated with class jealousy.

A TV hyphenate making his feature debut, Parriott knows how to keep us from switching the channel. There’s a “Chinatown”-style scandal as the plot motor: the cocaine-overdose death of a reactionary U.S. senator at a Graham orgy. And the movie races along from its near-artsy, opening--quick fragments of the orgy and drug overdose--into a thick fog of danger, L.A. swank and buddyhood.

Throughout, “Heart” seems crammed with talent. Arthur Albert’s cinematography catches a poisonous quality in the L.A. sunlight. The score, by Patrick Leonard, who sometimes produces and writes for Madonna, has a tricky, seductive ambiance; the jazzier stretches almost sound like Keith Jarrett. Webb, Meek, Ray Baker, Ja’net Dubois--in a telling scene as Stone’s disapproving mama--and the others make up a tangy ensemble.

The movie’s only major problem is its formula shtick and that silly premise: Archie Bunker and his talking black heart. The joke is too obvious and the key scene, the rapprochement between Stone and Moony, lacks punch. “Heart” also probably errs in having Moony, throughout, converse so openly with his invisible partner. Wouldn’t a savvy streetwise cop try to hide these spooky conversations more? Hoskins, last seen battling Toons in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” is peerless at playing with actors who aren’t there--but there are too many cheap laughs here at his expense.

Still, in many ways, “Heart” (rated R for sex, violence and language) is in the right place. Buddy movies usually succeed on chemistry--and Hoskins and Washington have more of it here than they need or can use. They’re able to pull this movie right off its hook and let it fly.