‘The Hard Way’ (R)

Director John Badham gets a lot of box-office bang for his money in "The Hard Way" -- hard-hitting cop/killer suspense, Indy-movie adventure spoof and Hollywood in-joke satire. That all these different movies are jostling for screen time like Sybil's imperfectly assimilated personalities is probably not going to keep him from doing box-office bang biz, either.

"The Hard Way" kicks in with a New York-by-night sequence as quick and sharp as a stiletto attack, and with the same rather impressive anonymity. Against the scratch-rhythm lights of Times Square and a crowded but not-too-chrome nightclub, the serial killer (a bleached-blond Stephen Lang with white-rimmed bulging eyes and Joker split-screen grins) announces and carries out his latest execution under the nose of NYPD Lt. John Moss (a grimly gaunt James Woods).

Enter screen idol Nick Lang, whose "Smoking Gunn" movies, dashing and improbable Indiana Jones affairs, permeate not only Times Square via billboard but the entire New York "reality" of the script, via celebrity fever. Nick Lang, spoiled, sprout-eating and cellular phone-addicted, is played by Michael J. Fox, who makes a rather impressive run as an actor playing an actor sometimes playing an actor, all with various degrees of talent. (His "drag" scene, in which he tries to help Woods practice talking to his girlfriend, is smarmily Arsenio-perfect.)

Fox, who wants to prove his "serious" talent by getting the lead in an upcoming police-action movie, sees Woods on the TV news and determines to "study" him for his audition. He persuades the precinct captain to pretend he's a rookie and partner him with Woods, and then proceeds to sabotage the cop's hunt for the killer and confuse his fledgling affair. There are Bernard Goetz jokes (when a subway gang flashes guns, every other rider, starting with the Orthodox rabbi, pulls out a piece), Jimmy Cagney jokes (the final battle takes place "on top of the world" on the 3-D billboard of Nick Lang's head), even Steven Seagal jokes (Fox as a cop with his hair in a ponytail).

In fact, for all its weaknesses, "The Hard Way" passes so gratifyingly fast -- and is so gratuitously violent, which is in itself a type of spoof -- that even the schizophrenic shifts from comedy to thriller become less bothersome. (Badham had something of the same integration problem with "Bird on a Wire.") The casting is choice: Woods, who convincingly spits out straight a danger-is-our-life tirade that Fox will later parrot -- displays theatrical ambidexterity; and Fox is engagingly happy to goose his own golden egg. Penny Marshall is pungently funny, because poker-faced, as Lang's mothering money-shark of an agent; and rap vet/rookie actor LL Cool J as an undercover cop is smooth as an old pro.

The most annoying elements in this movie are the egregious product endorsements, which are getting to be a low common denominator; and the humor, which wants to get away with being "hip" about some stereotypes while exploiting them at the same time. That's humor the easy way.