MOVIE REVIEW : Two Spies, Two Genres and a Baby

In the overbroad, underdone comedy thriller “Undercover Blues” (citywide) Dennis Quaid and Kathleen Turner play Jeff and Jane Blue, a lovable maverick CIA agent and his wife. Together in thrill-a-minute New Orleans--a city shot through so many colored filters it looks as if it were swimming in gumbo--the Blues wage lighthearted, wise-cracking battles against female terrorists and street scum.

Ian Abrams’ script obviously wants us to see the Blues as a modern Nick and Nora Charles--the super-sophisticated detective couple of the “Thin Man” series. But the way they josh, bash and zing the villains is closer to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Nick and Nora got by on brainpower and booze; Jane and Jeff are black-belt spoofers.

There’s a twist here, but it’s almost embarrassing to mention it. The Blues have a baby--Michelle Schuelke as Jane Louise Blue--and in their fights and chases, they bring Baby Blue along in a stroller. Why? Can’t CIA agents afford baby-sitters? Is this some mad stab at family bonding? Or did Abrams overdose on too many baby-cart samurai movies?

The obvious answer: It’s all a high demographic concept about a young married couple with child, who get into just as much fun and trouble as movie bachelor girls and boys. Making movie marriage and parenthood more exciting isn’t an unworthy goal, but, in this case, Baby Blue isn’t much better integrated into the story than if she were a rag doll schlepped from scene to scene. In one scene, she’s replaced by a doll, an exploding one.

The movie has very agile staging by Herbert Ross, a master of blocking, who, in the 1980s, endowed dubious projects like “The Secret of My Success” and “Protocol” with an elegance of movement and visual shine that sometimes made them seem even tawdrier and shallower. Some high-style actors are around too: not only Turner and Quaid, but the great, gleaming Fiona Shaw, who tears into the ridiculous role of superspy Novacek, a Budapest barracuda. And Stanley Tucci, who gets virtually the only promising comic role: a kind of Clouseau of sleazy street muggers who keeps announcing, bristlingly “I am Muerte,” and then goes ballistic when Jeff Blue replies, “Hiya, Morty.”

But you can’t pump style in a vacuum, and the genres Abrams tries to pastiche--screwball detective comedy and James Bond thrillers--don’t really mix. One is all glitter and alcoholic badinage; the other is mostly slick brutalism and innuendo. “Undercover Blues” ends up being a slightly unpleasant wish-fulfillment fantasy. The Blues ridicule everyone else, especially the interracial cop team inexplicably shadowing them. And they show their love by egging each other on in street battles.

There’s something smug about “Undercover Blues,” and it’s epitomized by the near-constant mile-wide grin on Quaid’s face. Quaid’s sharkish smirking suggests that he knows he’ll never lose a fight, perhaps because he’s already read the script. Turner smiles away the movie, too; occasionally they resemble two anchor-persons delivering superman sadism and karate instead of the news.

Halfway through “Undercover Blues” (rated PG-13), Jeff poses as Hildy Johnson, reporter for the Chicago Herald: an allusion to the greatest American stage comedy, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s “The Front Page.” But evoking “The Front Page” or “The Thin Man” only points up the discrepancies between their era and our own. Abrams wants the verbal panache of Hecht, Hammett, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, but he’s closer to Stanley Shapiro--who wrote the Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies. If Doris and Rock had kept it up a little longer, they might have wound up making movies like “Undercover Blues” too. Then Turner and Quaid, freed from the need to make it again, would really have had something to grin about.

‘Undercover Blues’

Kathleen Turner: Jane Blue

Dennis Quaid: Jeff Blue

Fiona Shaw: Novacek

Stanley Tucci: Muerte

A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presentation of a Lobell/Bergman/Hera production. Director Herbert Ross. Producer Mike Lobell. Executive producers Ross, Andrew Bergman. Screenplay Ian Abrams. Cinematographer Donald E. Thorin. Editor Priscilla Nedd-Friendly. Costumes Wayne Finkelman. Music David Newman. Production design Ken Adam. Art director William J. Durrell, Jr. Running time: 1 hour, 29 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13 (for one use of strong language).