Bowfinger - Starring Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Heather Graham - Movies

Bowfinger might be biting the hand that feeds it, with an insider’s satire on Hollywood, but this supposed return to form by the long-unfunny funny guy Steve Martin is really all gums.

Lacking the courage of its convictions as a send-up, and lacking the charm or story to make it work as a light comedy of in-jokes, it tends towards flatness with a just few peaks.

It’s the sort of movie where you sit there hoping for the big knee-slapper prodded along by a trickle of mild rib-ticklers, but the patella-crunching moments rarely arrive.

That said, considering it’s a Steve Martin movie and all (written by him, directed by onetime Muppet man Oz), Murphy is particularly good. He’s playing paranoid action star Kit Ramsey as well as his kindly, dim-witted lookalike, Jiff.

Blowhard producer-director Bobby Bowfinger (Martin) needs Ramsey to headline his make-or-break Z-grader Chubby Rain. Without a chance of him signing on, Bowfinger films the star covertly and uses Jiff as a stand-in.

When the rest of Chubby’s cast start confronting Ramsey on the street with lines about aliens, it cracks his fragile mental state a little more and sends him running for extra sessions at his self-help guru’s MindHead, a broad though frequently hilarious parody of Hollywood’s flirtation with scientology, with Terence Stamp as its high priest.

There’s a love interest in Heather Graham’s Daisy, an ingenue on a mission to sleep her way to the lower middle, while Martin’s lovable klutz at least reminds you of his unhinged early work.

On the recent television profile of his career, Martin fessed up to having made no great movies, but plenty of great scenes. Nothing about Bowfinger, which does have some neatly delivered set-ups but no real drive, changes that particular batting average.

n.e.w@journalist.com

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Page Updated Sun Mar 26, 2000 5:29am EST