MOVIE REVIEW : Mixing Oil and Perrier : John Badham’s ‘The Hard Way’ is loud, brash, racy and, on its own shallow terms, a fairly entertaining buddy-buddy tale.

Is Los Angeles the world’s principality of palm trees, power lunches and media ephemera? Is New York a capital of culture loaded with wise guys, ethnic riches and mean, vibrantly sleazy streets?

In “The Hard Way” (citywide), the moviemakers ram these two cliches together with a tongue-in-cheek vengeance. It’s a buddy-buddy movie in which the two main characters--a nail-hard Manhattan homicide cop (James Woods as John Moss) and a winsomely cute action-movie Hollywood superstar (Michael J. Fox as Nick Lang)--become symbols of their respective cities. In it, New York declares warfare on wimp-ridden L.A. and L.A. wins New York over with charm, guile and movie deals.

Fox’s Lang and Woods’ Moss, thrown together because the actor is researching the cop for an upcoming movie, are the male-bonding equivalents of the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote. Their relationship is different, but it’s just as stylized, just as fraught with physical peril. Lang gets hurled head-over-heels out a barroom window; Moss goes flying down the street on a tow-truck’s swinging door. In between them are the love interest (Annabella Sciorra) and the death interest: a grinning serial killer who calls himself the Party Crasher (Stephen Lang).

It’s a big, blowzy, hard-racing, half-bright movie that comes at you a mile-a minute: hyperactive, packed to the brim, jabbering away like a speed freak on a roller-coaster. Its basic premise is that movie cops and real-life cops, like L.A. and N.Y., are oil and water--especially when one of them is used to car phones and poolside haute cuisine and the other favors a bat on the skull and Frog Dogs smothered with mustard.

The director, John Badham, knows how to handle this kind of big, brassy pop entertainment, and he leaves reality behind quite early. He’s dealing less with impressions than with all the L.A.-N.Y. images sprayed onto the screen in two decades of action movies. His “Hard Way” is like a conventional, overdressed buddy-buddy cop movie, another “Lethal Weapon” or “Running Scared,” with the screening-room wisecracks built right into the script.

The numerous inside filmmaking gags, on everything from sequels and promos to Mel Gibson’s bottom to Michael J. Fox’s height (the prime running gag in the movie), also point up its main incongruity: the fact that the fantasy land of L.A. seems so much realer than the Manhattan grit.

In a way, Michael J. Fox is fleeing into the same sort of movie he’s trying to avoid, the kind with Roman numerals in the title--and the whole movie is a rumination on buddy-buddy scripts. The Party Crasher, who often seems like a frustrated screenwriter, composes all his murders on a computer, and at one point Lang bursts in on Moss and announces he knows what’s about to happen because they’ve just reached the “third act.” The characters even flee into one of Lang’s movies (a “Raiders of the Lost Ark” parody) and, before the end, they’ve gotten swallowed up in the marketing campaign too: all four of them clambering around a huge three-dimensional billboard with Lang’s face puffing smoke into the Times Square night.

“The Hard Way” (rated R) is loud, brash, racy and, on its own shallow terms, fairly entertaining. Die-hard fans of buddy-buddy movies will appreciate the often sarcastic dialogue, the garish over-the-top flamboyance with which Badham and the screenwriters hurl around all the cliches of the genre, from “Hill Street Blues” station-house clutter to the monstrous super-villain. Playing the maniacal Crasher, Stephen Lang has Rutger Hauer’s hairdo and Ron Liebman’s smile; he’s a real scene-chewer.

Less hardened audiences may object to the unrelenting, unmodulated tempo, the crash-bang cartoon simplifications and the silly way the tag-team of screenwriters drag in Moss’ romance and turn it into a triangle. Trapped between Woods and Fox, Annabella Sciorra’s Susan might as well be walking around wearing a sandwich board emblazoned “Obligatory Girlfriend” on one side and “Humanizing Element” on the other.

But it’s Woods and Fox who are the movie’s core. They’re an interesting duo, though they don’t exactly show on-screen chemistry. Often they seem to be in the middle of an actor’s duel, pushing their roles naturally to the edge of caricature--and their best scene is a male-bonding homoerotic sendup staged in that machismo-soaked Manhattan bar, McSorley’s.

Badham directs the dialogue as if he were trying to remake “His Girl Friday.” The actors not only step on lines, they keep kicking each other’s lines in the shin.

Woods uses his trademark battering, live-wire intensity to extravagant satiric effect, jamming down hard on every phrase, letting his chin dart around madly. Fox counters by continually flickering his eyes around in those hurt, burnt, boyish looks of his, playing with his lip, letting his spaniel eyes brush around the room, plaintively.

Standing in for the Big Apple and La La-land, Woods dynamically plays the abrasive cynic to Fox’s sultry, laid-back dilettante. They’re good, but if they had more to work with they might really be dynamite. Instead, they have to pull back and watch the dynamite blow up all around them.

‘The Hard Way’

Michael J. Fox: Nick Lang

James Woods: John Moss

Stephen Lang: Party Crasher

Annabella Sciorra: Susan

A Universal Pictures presentation of a Badham/Cohen Group-William Sackheim production. Director John Badham. Producer William Sackheim, Rob Cohen. Executive producer. Screenplay by Daniel Pyne, Lem Dobbs. Cinematographer Don McAlpine, Robert Primes. Editor Frank Morriss, Tony Lombardo. Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (language, violence).