Big Apple Crumble By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 2, 1999

Travel is trying for Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn in "The Out-of-Towners." (Paramount) Director: Sam Weisman Cast: Steve Martin; Goldie Hawn; Mark McKinney; John Cleese; Gregory Jbara; Philip Johnson Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes Some questionable material where Goldie Hawn pretends to be a prostitute to get a free room. Bring ear protection

The ringing in your ears? The vague nausea? The sense of 90 minutes plucked from your life, never to return? The dispirited disassociation, the grumpiness, the surliness that follow? The sweat, the bruises, the sense of being dried out? All identical to the same symptoms created by exposure to the authentic real-time "The Out-of-Towners."

There! I just saved you eight bucks!

If you've seen the preview you've seen the movie. In fact, there really isn't a movie. There's a preview and then a much longer preview. It's driven forward by the brute insistence that it's entertaining to watch well-dressed adults fall-down-go-boom for an hour and a half and even more fun when Goldie Hawn whines like a buzz-saw chewing through a chain-link fence. If you're not totally grogged out by all this, there's the ever-helpful musical score, blasting out of speakers turned all the way up to 11, numbing your brain and playing pure hob with your inner-ear balance with elevator-style Muzak versions of old New York standards. You'll take Manhattan? Not at 428 dBs, you won't.

Hawn and Steve Martin play two hapless Ohioans, Nancy and Henry Clark, off to the Big Town for a job interview. He can't tell her he's already lost his position in a Buckeye State ad firm in one of that industry's eternal youth movements. Now he's trying to get a job at a cutting-edge agency where they all look like rock stars on methamphetamines. His Florsheim wingtips will fit right in with that crowd.

But that's mere pretext. The text of the film is the endless physical stumbles that befall these two as New York rises up in all its malevolence to destroy them. Still, the movie isn't smart. It doesn't really see New York in its arrogant, bad-listening-skills self-indulgence, a town full of people who aren't quite as smart as they think, talk too fast, say too little and have had their brains turned to oatmeal by too many rides in too many taxis without shocks. And here's the funny part: They were all out-of-towners too, at one point.

What crushes the Clarks really has almost nothing to do with New York, but only with the force of gravity. If you fall down, it hurts. Even a child understands this. The Clarks, however, seem eternally surprised when they crash into stewardesses, fall out of taxicabs or are compelled to leap off balconies to discover the occurrence of pain. Isn't there any pain in Ohio?

The movie, written by Marc Lawrence after a lame original starring Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis from a Neil Simon script in 1970, and directed by Sam Weisman, is so predictable you could chart the tides off it. Do you really wonder if Henry gets the big job, Florsheims and all? Will Henry and Nancy reconcile after their many screaming tiffs? Oh, please.

The film has about seven minutes of good material, mostly provided by John Cleese as an unctuously candid hotel manager who secretly cross-dresses and dances to the music of bad-girl divas. Then there's Martin, who is capable of some very funny walks. He does one through Central Park where his shoes seem to weigh 40 pounds apiece and his knees splay toward Ontario and Miami, pushing his center of gravity toward Istanbul while this arms pump in the directions of Vladivostok and Uganda. That's pretty funny. But then it's over and you're back in the movie.