‘What Planet’ deserves trip back to Mars

In theaters

“What Planet Are You From?”

Obviously, director Mike Nichols set his phasers on “stun” when he made “What Planet Are You From?” a moldy little piece of sci-fi cheese that has the stink of failure all over it.

The film features a planet populated solely with men who are so evolved, they have no emotions and no genitalia, which apparently shrunk and fell off through thousands of years of cloning and disuse. (Men, take note.)

A quick glance at the credits confirms the film wasn’t produced by the members of NOW, and that turns out to be the biggest surprise in a film that makes the fatal mistake of also neutering its comedy.

But poor Mike Nichols. What was the director of “The Graduate,” “Silkwood,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Carnal Knowledge” thinking to make this, a film that fits one of its male aliens — Garry Shandling, of all people — with a humming, mechanical penis before sending him to Earth so he can mate with a woman and thus begin a fierce takeover of our planet?

It’s difficult to know what Nichols saw in the script, which took no fewer than four writers — including Shandling — to pipe in from Mars, but since Nichols has directed so many good films, we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here. This could, after all, be one of those films whose concept seemed funny on paper the way the words “presidential candidate George W. Bush” seem funny on paper. It’s certainly wacky in concept, but ultimately it’s bad for audiences.

Not to mention being bad for Annette Bening, who appears in “Planet” as Susan, a recovering alcoholic who agrees to marry Shandling’s alien and also bear his child.

The timing of this film couldn’t be worse for Bening. Just as Academy voters are deciding whether to give her the Academy Award for Best Actress in “American Beauty,” which she deserves, they are suddenly faced with this, a film that repeatedly asks her to crawl into bed with Shandling and react time and again to his one-note performance and to his character’s troublesome, whirring equipment.

Actually, when you look at it that way, maybe this is the film that should snag her the Academy Award.

Grade: D

On video

“The Bone Collector”

No offense, but as hobbies go, the one found within Phillip Noyce’s “The Bone Collector” is right up there with collecting Beanie Babies: One just wants to ask, “Why?”

Still, here they are, a bunch of bones being collected by a mad serial killer on the loose in the bowels of New York. The film, which is initially so good, it feels like riding a scream into a nightmare, quickly mellows, becoming an uneven pastiche of other thrillers, including “Silence of the Lambs,” “The Seventh Sign” and particularly David Fincher’s “Se7en.”

But Noyce is no Fincher, a director who clearly wallows in his unseemly atmospheres. Instead, Noyce seems almost repelled by what he’s unleashed.

In scene after scene, he holds back, unwilling — or unable — to give audiences what they want: a film that digs and claws and bites its way under their skin.

What’s more maddening about “Collector” is how close it comes to being a good film. Throughout, the film is peppered with terrific scenes immediately followed by corny bits of dialogue, improbable situations or an obvious misunderstanding of police work. Anyone who reads voraciously in the thriller-police genre will groan at the ridiculous liberties Noyce has taken for dramatic effect.

In the film, Denzel Washington is Lincoln Rhyme, a brilliant, world-renowned forensic detective who was injured in the line of duty. Now a quadriplegic, he has use of “one finger, two shoulders and a brain,” and he’s planning his “final transition.”

But when a serial killer starts his murderous rampage in New York, deliberately leaving obscure clues leading to each of his victims, Rhyme becomes involved, quickly enlisting the help of Amelia Donaghy (Angelina Jolie), a model turned police officer who does Rhyme’s legwork — while also, predictably, winning his heart.

Washington and Jolie are good, as is Queen Latifah as Rhyme’s no-nonsense nurse, but far less effective is Michael Rooker as Capt. Howard Cheney.

Horribly miscast in a role that demands strength and subtlety, Rooker is a swaggering laughingstock, choosing caricature and cliche over character and credibility. It is he, and the film’s bizarre, out-of-left-field ending, that strips the meat straight off this thriller’s bones.

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 “NEWS CENTER 5:30 Today” and “NEWS CENTER Tonight,” and each Saturday and Sunday on NEWS CENTER’s statewide “Morning Report.”

THE VIDEO CORNER

Renting a video? NEWS film critic Christopher Smith can help. Below are his grades of recent releases in video stores.

Eyes Wide Shut B+ Buena Vista Social Club B+ The Bone Collector C+ Twin Falls Idaho A The Best Man B Random Hearts C- Stigmata C- Bats C Brokedown Palace C+ Double Jeopardy B- An Ideal Husband A- The Story of Us D The Astronaut’s Wife D- The Winslow Boy A- Runaway Bride C- Stir of Echoes A- Tarzan B+