'Conspiracy': Just Plotting Along

I don't want to write this but they're making me. Who? Oh, you know. The usual. Them. They. The watchers in the shadows, the manipulators, the hidden persuaders.

They're addressing me through my fillings and telling me, "Go ahead, tell everybody how good `Conspiracy Theory' is! Or be disappeared!"

But, I'm trying to argue, it's not very good.

"That doesn't matter," they insist. "You have your orders."

Well, I answer my fillings, see, this job would be much easier if I could remember one damned thing about it!

For that is the only reality to "Conspiracy Theory." It is one of those soap bubbles of a film, fleeting, ephemeral, seemingly there when it is not. As you leave the theater, it diminishes with each step, collapsing into shards of imagery and sensations of movement. It's the film that never was.

Only one thing is sure: Director Richard Donner has seen "Taxi Driver" too many times. For as he chronicles the nightly peregrinations of screwball cabdriver Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson) through the gritty streets of Gotham, he so faithfully purloins Martin Scorsese's imagery -- the sleek yellow cab afire with the reflection of a thousand neon lights as it slides through the wafting steam from underground, negotiating a passage among the carbuncular pimps, whores, gandy dancers and lost souls who crowd the big hurdy-gurdy -- that you're thinking: What is this, Film 101?

When Donner gets around to the story, we finally meet Jerry. Now I may be wrong about this, but who wants to see Mel Gibson in the role Dustin Hoffman was born to play? Mel's Jerry is furtive, twitchy, loquacious, self-important and tiny. His mind, we learn quickly, is somewhat imperfect, as if Al Capp's old Fearless Fosdick had blown several Swiss cheese-style holes through his cerebellum. Jerry is your Compleat Conspiracy Phreak, who thinks, among other things, the CIA has perfected earthquake control mechanisms. He publishes information of this nature in a newsletter called Conspiracy Theory, which has a circulation of five. He has other obsessions that would seem unseemly if only it weren't the beautiful Mel who held them.

One involves a government prosecutor named Alice (Julia Roberts) on whom he spies each night, for reasons that are initially unclear. Sometimes he visits her at her office, screaming that They Are Out to Get Him, which gets him tossed out every time, on the principle that They Don't Give a Hoot About Him. Still, Alice is always kind and clearly has some kind of secret attraction to him, of the sort that is found only in movies.

And something that is found mostly in movies is dark secret agencies with extraordinary resources at their command, just like the one in "Conspiracy Theory." It's fronted by Patrick Stewart in McGeorge Bundy's glasses and Adlai Stevenson's haircut and O.J. Simpson's double-breasted suits. To me, the wardrobe director is the key figure in the conspiracy theory behind "Conspiracy Theory."

The nub of the movie is simple: They Really Are Out to Get Him. That is not the conspiracy theorist's darkest fear, however, but more like his fondest desire. It means he was right, he does count, he's not some marginal lizard scavenging for garbage. But the movie reiterates so many old sequences from the canon that it continues to feel more like Film 101 than anything spontaneously alive. Jerry is kidnapped and tortured by Stewart's ironic doctor (from "Marathon Man"); he and Alice are thrown together and must flee for their lives (from, take your pick, "The 39 Steps" or "North by Northwest"); locked in Jerry's mind are strange memories of government service ("The Long Kiss Goodnight"); and so forth and so on.

The only thing that can really be said to provide continual pleasure in the film is the nice chemistry between the two big stars. It's so nice, in fact, and they seem so comfortable in each other's presence that you wish the movie's theoretical concerns had been with attraction rather than conspiracy.

Donner is slick and shallow, but somewhat off his game here; he never comes close to the intensity of action that marked his original "Lethal Weapon." It's as if he doesn't really believe in the material. His work is rote, mechanical -- as if his mind has been taken over by aliens or commies or the NRA-CIA-FAA-Martha Stewart combine. Hmm, I wonder if th-- siuy;lq cbqu9[3v 9-qu[ qc [0vn]q9pjhi!!!

[Editor's note: At 2:44 p.m., Hunter vanished from the office.]

Conspiracy Theory, at area theaters, is rated R for casual slaughter and mayhem, as well as scenes of torture.