MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Short Time’: A Comedy That’s Long on Car Chases and Carnage

“Short Time,” a comedy thriller about a cop who has a death wish imposed on him, illustrates something funny-peculiar about movies these days.

In the great screwball comedy days, one or two contract writers could take a kicky little premise, usually involving swindles or mistaken identity, and fine-tune it into a ticking, paroxysmal comic time bomb, set to explode at regular intervals. In the current high concept, high-impact era, the movies explode all right--but, more often, into sheer physical carnage.

That’s what happens in “Short Time” (citywide). Halfway through, there’s a great comic car chase, a slapstick destruction derby obviously modeled on “The French Connection,” in which seemingly doomed Burt (Dabney Coleman) does everything conceivable to goad two fleeing crooks into killing him: hopping over highway dividers, ramming them from the rear, going “nanny-nanny-naa” as they point automatic rifles at him.

It’s a wow of a chase, a real show-stopper. Back in the old screwball days, there are few directors who could have topped it. But, sadly, “Short Time” is almost all physical mechanics.

The premise is classic screwball: Preston Sturges himself once worked with a team of writers that turned something similar into the 1939 Bob Hope vehicle “Never Say Die.” Here, Coleman’s cop Burt, after getting his urine sample switched and mistakenly being diagnosed as a future fatality, starts behaving with reckless courage, wild generosity, selfless love. He hurls himself into one dangerous mission after another, stuns his ex-wife and partner with protestations of love and tries to arrange an insurance nest egg for his son’s Harvard education by dying in the line of duty.

The spectacle of a man hurtling blithely from one catastrophe to another, unwilling possessor of a charmed life, has lots of possibilities. And, director Gregg Champion, once John Badham’s second-unit man, keeps things popping. But the human side of the story gets thin.

When Burt tries to talk a potential suicide out of blowing himself up, he seems to be sincere--while the comedy of the scene might lie in Burt’s trying, and failing, to goad the would-be suicide into killing him .

It’s another TV generation movie. There are gags about cops engrossed in soap operas and even “Sesame Street” allusions: Burt’s partner is named Ernie (Matt Frewer).

Coleman is that rarity: a passionate comedian. Like Danny DeVito or Bob Hoskins, he deals with big, dark emotions: bluster, pain, fury. Coleman has such vein-popping intensity, he could carry this film into a paroxysm almost single-handedly--and Frewer, wife Teri Garr and Capt. Barry Corbin could probably be great bystanders. But “Short Time” (rated PG-13, despite language, violence and sexual allusions), a movie about pain and mortality sharpening your reflexes, suffers from dull nerves itself. If the fear of death makes you more brave and human, why hasn’t it worked on this movie?