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Beware killers who hum tunes

By Anita Gates
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Friday, Sep 26, 2003, Page 20

This is a very strange bunch of criminals. They have the eyes of hardened men, they kill with deliberate casualness and they are all huge fans of Broadway musicals.

When Johnny Crown (Denis Leary), praises Rodgers and Hammerstein while pouring Champagne, he begins to sing Anything You Can Do, Frank Gavilan (Joe Mantegna) knows that's an Irving Berlin number instead and says so. When Johnny mentions having played the Mitzi Gaynor role in South Pacific in prison, Ned Lynch (Larry Bishop) says "Nellie Forbush'' and nods, impressed. Well, Gaynor was only in the film version, but you get the idea.

Yet Underworld, the new film that these characters inhabit, is not a comedy. It's a bloody, ultraviolent, profane psychological thriller that is probably trying to be Pulp Fiction and in the attempt proves just how brilliant Pulp Fiction was. John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson made Quentin Tarantino's pre-crime banter about Big Macs and foot massages look easy, but apparently it wasn't. Underworld contains echoes of Unforgiven, too, and, at the beginning, the lingering shots of a row of men being gunned down owe it all to Bonnie and Clyde.

Underworld is a strange mix of a movie, a pale imitation of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, but entertaining nevertheless. PHOTOS COURTESY OF FOX

Fine actors in the lead roles struggle to maintain their dignity and to breathe some believability into these characters, who all talk strangely alike, and to an admirable degree they succeed. Leary is an ex-con who has decided to celebrate Father's Day by killing everyone who was involved in his father's murder. (The father is only brain-dead at the beginning of the film, but a middle-of-the-night suffocation soon takes care of that technicality.) Mantegna's Frank is the hoodlum who may have been the mastermind.

Film Notes: Underworld Directed by: Roger Christian Starring: Denis Leary (Johnny Crown), Joe Mantegna (Frank Gavilan), Annabella Sciorra (Dr. Leah), Larry Bishop (Ned Lynch) and Abe Vigoda (Will Cassady) Running time: 95 minutes Taiwan Release: Today

Annabella Sciorra is Frank's estranged wife, a psychiatrist who has inexplicably agreed to surprise him by turning up in a hotel room furnished with only an analyst's couch in the middle of the floor. She is given nothing to do but smoke, succumb to Frank's sexual advances and look slightly dazed. She does get to explain to the two men how twinges of guilt about patricide -- "the original Oedipal crime," she informs them -- led to civilization as we know it.

The joke is that Johnny has just spent his seven years in prison studying to become a psychotherapist (he describes himself as "the only working psychopathic psychotherapist in all of psychopathology'') and now sees everything in terms of denial, defense mechanisms and deeply buried emotions. Most of the time, however, he and the other characters seem to have no motivation for their lines, except to prove how clever the script is. The lines tell nothing about the people speaking them, except that everyone in the underworld is extremely verbal.
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