‘Double Take’ Tries to Play It for Thrills and Laughs

First the good news: George Gallo’s “Double Take” is an even-handed mixture of suspense and comedy that aims to play fair with the audience on both fronts. Although the movie’s mismatched elements never jell, it’s worth noting that this isn’t just a raucous farce with a few allusions to clues and detective work haphazardly thrown in, or a violent crime picture decorated with lame wisecracks.

Like Gallo’s memorable screenplay for “Midnight Run” (1988), in which bounty hunter Robert De Niro and state’s witness Charles Grodin bickered and bonded and dodged bullets, “Double Take” uses a thriller situation to pressurize a clash of personalities.

Daryl Chase (Orlando Jones) is a preening investment banker on the run from a phony murder rap who is saddled with an overbearing traveling companion he can’t seem to shake. Freddy Tiffany (Eddie Griffin) enters the film decked out as a high-stepping street hustler, although he claims to be an FBI agent operating undercover. Daryl is determined to keep a low profile, and Freddy makes it a point of honor to stick out like a sore thumb in every situation.

So he doesn’t just dress to the nines as he infiltrates a glossy Victoria’s Secret-style lingerie show and attempts to blend in with the high rollers, but within seconds he’s up there on the runway with the supermodels, doing a rubber-legged dance, grinning like a maniac.

Jones is quite engaging as Daryl, a serious if self-satisfied young man, suitably troubled when he begins to suspect that his Wall Street banking firm has become a Laundromat for Mexican drug money. Within minutes he has been framed for murder and sold out to the police. And like all falsely accused movie characters who would be better off sticking around to try to sort things out, Daryl bolts, pursued by several competing teams of scary beefy men armed with automatic weapons.

*

Since all of Daryl’s pursuers are cut from the same cloth, and because every one seems to be misrepresenting himself, we literally don’t know who’s who or what’s what from one minute to the next. Those guys over there seem to be federal agents pretending to be New York cops posing as drug gangsters--or maybe it’s the other way around. “Double Take” takes the old Raymond Chandler rule for juicing the tension in a thriller (“When in doubt, have a guy come through a door with a gun in his hand”) and makes a fetish out it.

The confusion is compounded by the movie’s failure to make sense of the relationship between the two men. The performers signal their mutual admiration with a wink here and a grin there, even though their characters supposedly despise each other. As if to compensate for this lack of focus, all the spats are enacted at maximum volume, pitched so high that we often don’t know how to take them. Somebody always seem to be screaming or cursing or making a face, and the physical exchanges are too thuddingly brutal to be shrugged off as slapstick horseplay.

In the 13 years since “Midnight Run” was released, the conventions of movie comedy have shifted drastically. Laughs that arise organically, out of consistently developed characters in plausible situations, are now anachronistic exceptions to the no-hold-barred rule. Just ask Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler. Even a sincere attempt like Gallo’s to combine up-to-the-minute non sequitur humor and a believable thriller plot may be an enterprise doomed to failure--especially with a master of free-form lunacy like Griffin aboard.

*

Griffin is a gifted comic, almost exhaustingly energetic and inventive. He gets more mileage out a big wide mouth than any funnyman since Joe E. Brown. But he is also a post-Robin Williams wild man, in the sense that everything he does is a piece of stand-alone shtick, with no central character premise to hold the gestures together. It is conceivable that a character could someday be written that Griffin could portray convincingly. But a hush-hush incognito operative with a long-haired Chihuahua in a gym bag and a radio transmitter in a ball-point pen may not be (to put it mildly) the role he was born to play.

* Rating PG-13: Mature themes, some violent content, a sexual reference. Times Guidelines: A surprisingly dark tone of betrayal and ruthlessness for a comedy that may be disturbing to young viewers.

‘Double Take’

Orlando Jones: Daryl Chase

Eddie Griffin: Freddy Tiffany

Edward Herrmann: Charles Allsworth

Garcelle Beauvais: Chloe

Shawn Elliott: Thomas Chela

Andrea Navedo: Maque Sanchez

Touchstone Pictures presents a Permut Presentations/Rat Entertainment production, released by Buena Vision Pictures. Director-Screenwriter George Gallo. Producers David Permut, Brett Ratner. Executive Producers Barry Bernardi, Michael Rotenberg. Director of Photography Theo van de Sande. Editor Malcolm Campbell. Production Designer Stephen Lineweaver. Costume Designer Sharen Davis. Music Graeme Revell. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes.