`Bowfinger’ ingenious, explosively funny

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BOWFINGER

The end of a career can be an ugly thing — just ask Puff Daddy — but what can be even uglier is a career that never takes off, no matter how great or exhaustive the effort to make it work.

Such is the case with Bobby Bowfinger (Steve Martin), a man on the wrong side of 49 whose perennial hope of hitting it big as a producer and director in Hollywood doesn’t quite have the same twinkle and shine it had when Bobby was twinkling and shining at 21.

In a town hooked on youth, Bobby is stale brioche, a California schemer who wears a clip-on ponytail and cheap suits, yet who nevertheless dreams of Armani.

Desperate for a hit, he thinks his big break rests in a sci-fi script called “Chubby Rain,” but before a studio will give him the go to make it, Bobby first must enlist the world’s hottest action star, Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy), a man who has no intention of starring in “Rain,” yet who, through a series of bizarre events, becomes the film’s star anyway.

In a cinematic climate still smitten with the low-budget of “The Blair Witch Project,” Bobby’s film — made on the cheap for $2,184 — should be intoxicating to watch unfold, and it is. Written by Martin and directed by Frank Oz, “Bowfinger” is an ingenious, sometimes explosively funny comedy about the film industry that’s as much a satire as it is a farce. It finds Martin back on Los Angeles soil, which, to him, is as rich as the soil in Woody Allen’s Manhattan.

With Christine Baranski in a wicked turn as a young Norma Desmond, and Heather Graham perfectly cast as a loose, upstart actress who sleeps her way through cast and crew, “Bowfinger” is great fun, a film that will remind some of Robert Altman’s “The Player” and Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” as it understands the desperation seething at the core of a corrupt industry.

Grade: B+

THE 13TH WARRIOR

John McTiernan’s “The 13th Warrior” is part “Beowulf” and part true story — if you can believe that after seeing it.

Based on Michael Crichton’s 1976 novel “Eaters of the Dead,” the film is thunderously loud, an Iron Age predecessor to Wrestlemania that stars Antonio Banderas as Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan, a cultured, 10th-century Arab poet who makes the mistake of making eyes at a king’s wife.

Expelled from Baghdad, Ahmed hits the road with his servant Melchisidek (Omar Sharif), and reluctantly finds himself swinging swords with a dozen big blond barbarians fighting a band of cannibalistic, cave-dwelling Viking hillbillies — a glum group who look as if they come from the Lost Isle of Chippendale Dancers.

The film, which was shelved by Touchstone Pictures for more than a year before it was released last summer (never a good sign, but brave in this case), is a convoluted mess of beheadings that’s so bloody, it makes Sissy Spacek seem freshly shampooed in the climactic scene of “Carrie.”

Not that any of this is steeped in any sort of originality; the film borrows shamelessly from Richard Fleischer’s “The Vikings” Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai,” and Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart.” It’s nowhere near as good as those films, but it does entertain in spite of itself. Indeed, with all of its grunts and groans — not to mention Banderas’ heavy eyeliner (look out Tammy Faye) — we haven’t seen this kind of excess since the 1980s.

Grade: C+

DUDLEY DO-RIGHT

Oh, Canada. Poor, poor Canada.

After the flogging our neighbors to the north received in “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut,” they now have to bend over for Hugh Wilson’s “Dudley Do-Right,” a cheerful, yet ultimately lackluster exercise in stupidity that makes the Royal Canadian Mounted Police look as if they’ve fallen off one too many horses.

Which, of course, is the point. The film, based on Jay Ward’s animated television series, has enough silly, slapstick humor to appeal to very young children, those who will grin — rather than grimace — at the film’s favorite and much-overused gag: Dudley (Brendan Fraser) being smacked in the face after stepping on a loose plank.

But adults hoping for a bit of nostalgia should mount a different horse. “Do-Right” doesn’t give Fraser, Sarah Jessica Parker or Alfred Molina enough to do — and at a brief 75 minutes, that does an audience wrong.

Grade: C-

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, each Tuesday and Thursday on WLBZ’s “NEWS CENTER 5:30 Today” and “NEWS CENTER Tonight,” and each Saturday and Sunday on NEWS CENTER’s statewide “Morning Report.”