MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Loose Cannons’ Needs Lots of Tightening

“Loose Cannons” (citywide) is yet another mismatched buddy-buddy cop movie. Even though director-co-writer Bob Clark has a bright, genial style, there’s a foredoomed feel about it all. Gene Hackman is the tough, irreverent old pro, Dan Aykroyd is his overly sensitive, on-the-edge partner and, once again, they battle their way through a screaming maze of psycho criminals, car-chases and wisecracks to find happiness.

As a buddy couple, Hackman and Aykroyd are not bad. Hackman’s shaggy realism rubs up nicely against Aykroyd’s nervous artifice, and they get some nice, relaxed badinage together. But the movie is like another race at the dog track, with the script as the mechanical rabbit. The writers, Clark and the father-son team of Richard and Richard Christian Matheson, must feel people are tired of drug czars. Here, their villains are Nazis, and the Macguffin at first seems to be a porno movie involving Hitler. Since Dom DeLuise is also in the cast--as Gutterman, an S&M; impresario--you might imagine Mel Brooks lurking behind this somewhere. No such luck.

The main gimmick is built around Aykroyd’s virtuoso mimicry. His character, Ellis Fielding, suffers from a personality disorder that makes him break out, under stress, into multiple TV and movie star impressions--as if Rich Little were playing “The Three Faces of Eve.” At odd moments, Fielding becomes Popeye the Sailor, The Roadrunner, Dirty Harry, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and most of the casts of “The Wizard of Oz” and “Star Trek.”

The movie keeps dropping its own balls. Fielding is introduced as a Sherlock Holmes-style deductive whiz, a quality that never resurfaces for the rest of the movie. Instead, we get the “Odd Couple” with “Lethal Weapons.” Prissy Fielding has just emerged from a Benedictine monastery with monk psychiatrists and he lives in a white-on-white apartment with tapes of beach sounds. Slob Mac has just had his apartment burned down and he lives in his station wagon, with his possessions, his cat and a leaky bag of cat litter. Instead of parking this mess somewhere, he goes on duty with his possessions strapped to the roof, even getting into high speed chases with them.

So there we are: crazed Nazis fighting odd-couple cops, one of whom suffers from TV schizophrenia. The FBI gets into the tangle too, along with the Israeli Secret Service, led by Riva (Nancy Travis) a Cosmo cover-girl type in an partly unbuttoned blouse.

There are moments when Aykroyd goes into one of his impressionist attacks, or when Hackman looks around him with one of his crinkled “Can you believe this?” grins and you realize how good they both can be. But, despite them, “Loose Cannons” (MPAA rated R, for violence and language) is a movie without ideas, armament without much ammunition. Like most Buddy-buddy cop movies it plays like Sisyphus and his rock; crashing back down the hill almost before you can roll it up.