CINEMA: Brain Dead but Not Stupid

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Send a couple of rodeo riders to New York City and you have what everyone must have hoped was the perfect reverse spin on City Slickers. In The Cowboy Way, the two rubes have many stupid misadventures as they try to save a young woman from white slavery. The sheer laziness of the writing, direction and especially the playing by Woody Harrelson and Kiefer Sutherland is stunning. The stars seem to be improvising much of the time and winking to the audience, "Hey, folks, we're having a lot of fun!" Hey, guys, we're not.

CYNICAL, INSULTING SENTIMENTALITY

Warm-hearted humanism is glopped all over Renaissance Man in the hopes that we won't notice that the story makes no sense. It proposes that the only job available to Bill Rago (Danny DeVito), a defrocked adman, is teaching an ill- defined lit course to a multicultural squad at an Army base. Why the commanding colonel thinks these studies are vitally necessary is not made clear. Especially since the kids turn out be quite sweet and bright and mostly doing fine in basic training. It's all really just a con on the part of the moviemakers, led by director Penny Marshall. The insensitive and materialistic teacher shall learn humility from his students. They shall in turn learn that underneath Shakespeare's big, arcane words and underneath Bill's hard shell, good hearts are athump. We shall all have a nice sniffle as we learn how easily class and racial distinctions can be dissolved by simple goodwill.

Here's an idea for Speed II: terrorist wires teacher's copy of Hamlet. If he gets to the "Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I" soliloquy -- Ka-BOOM!