MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Hear No Evil’ Cast Breaks Shackles : The yuppie-in-peril thriller benefits from an active cast and crew unconfined by stale guidelines.

In “Hear No Evil” (citywide), when director Robert Greenwald wants to convey the terror and isolation of a deaf woman pursued by killers, he uses two strategies. He either has the sound vanish, or he jacks it up so wildly that footsteps hammer out like a Wagnerian kettledrum.

Corny devices, but they work. And “Hear No Evil,” dumped unceremoniously into theaters last Friday, without critics’ screenings, works better than you’d expect.

Not without a struggle, though. In many ways, it’s another flashy trailer-movie, with a marketing-hook premise, a tag-team script and a narrative flow pasted together with rock, shock cuts and chic photography. The setup is obvious: beautiful, deaf athletic trainer Jillian Shananhan (Marlee Matlin), chased by fascistic cops and a mysterious masked menace, after a reporter friend (John C. McGinley) slips a priceless Alexandrian coin into her beeper.

Every once in a while, the screenwriters trap Jillian in a closet or blind alley, send her racing down a lonely road at night, or put her in an abandoned lodge while the killer prowls around. And sound, or its lack, are the key to her fears. The faintest noise, magnified, becomes her incessantly repeated death knell.

Yet “Hear No Evil’s” ultimate fate may not simply be sharing double bills with the 1971 “blind woman-in-peril” shocker, “See No Evil.” This picture has some life. It doesn’t always give off the stale, dead, manipulative feel of the usual yuppie-in-peril genre thriller: hyped-up, high-tech, over-programmed movies like “Fatal Attraction,” “Single White Female” and “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.” If you accept the fact that it’s nothing more than a standardized 1993 Hollywood product, you can enjoy yourself.

The director, Greenwald (“Sweet Heart’s Dance”), has a sure, vivifying touch with actors. Here, we can get pleasure in the way super-sensitive Matlin and the shaggy, ultra-boyish D. B.Sweeney play their love scenes together: tentatively, warily, full of buoyant give-and-take and sly wit. Or the way Martin Sheen knifes into his villain role of Brock, the slick, sadistic police lieutenant who tortures witnesses by turning up the sound on his favorite opera arias. Sheen plays Brock the way Eddie Albert used to play heavies for Robert Aldrich: as a smiling, graying winner, a snappy dresser with no morals.

Then there’s John C. McGinley, of the Oliver Stone stock company, who plays doomed reporter Mickey O’Malley--with such on-the-edge intensity that he cranks up the whole movie. More than that, there’s the film’s look. Normally, yuppie-in-peril shockers have glossy, barely-lived-in interiors. The decor’s message seems to be: Don’t let scum into your life because they’ll kill people and depreciate the property. But the production designer here--Bernt Capra, who directed “Mindwalk”--knows how to suggest personality by messing up a room; when he does have an immaculate interior, it belongs to Brock, a man who probably aspires to a life of erotic thriller elegance.

“Hear No Evil’s” soundpeople--who include mixer Mark Ulano, supervising sound editors Mark P. Stoeckinger and Wylie Statemen and six other sound editors--make the most palpable contribution--not just in the distortions that let us “share” Jillian’s deafness but in the way they use that sonic emblem of urban paranoia, noise from the street. The rushing traffic and helicopters outside the windows--or their sudden, eerie absence--become as much a presence as the characters.

Finding a good role for Matlin, the hearing-impaired actress who won an Oscar for her debut, at 21, in “Children of a Lesser God,” is obviously the reason d’etre of this movie. And, here, it’s a case of the actress bursting the bounds of her role, giving more than she was given, making Jillian lively, ultra-responsive, self-sufficient. “Hear No Evil” (MPAA rated R, for violence, language, sensuality) is basically a standard genre piece where cast and crew are more active than usual, where they try not to let the old, slick, stale guidelines kill their creative delight in making scenes play. That isn’t enough, but it’s something.

‘Hear No Evil’ Marlee Matlin: Jillian Shananhan D. B. Sweeney: Ben Kendall Martin Sheen: Lt. Philip Brock John C. McGinley: Mickey O’Malley

A Twentieth Century Fox Films presentation of a David Matalon production. Director Robert Greenwald. Producer David Matalon. Executive producer David Streit. Screenplay by R. M. Badat, Kathleen Rowell. Cinematographer Steven Shaw. Editor Eva Gardos. Costumes Fleur Thiemeyer. Music Grame Revell. Production design Bernt Capra. Art director John Myhre. Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (sensuality, violence, language).