2002, 1 hr 30 min., Rated PG-13 for action violence, language and some drug content.�Dir: Tom Dey. Cast: Robert De Niro (Mitch Preston), Eddie Murphy (Trey Sellars), Rene Russo (Chase Renzi), Pedro Dami�n (Vargas), T.J. Cross (ReRun), William Shatner (himself).

Showtime gives a lot of lip service to the genre of buddy cop films, but doesn't meet or exceed any of its predecessors (such as 48 Hours, Rush Hour and especially not Lethal Weapon). And if it's supposed to be a spoof as I later read, then it's even more a disappointment at the task.

Sure, plenty of stuff gets blow'd up, bullets whiz all over the place and an evil Eastern European spouts evilness, but it's very short and bland. Showtime could have played up every part of the movie more than it did, from the TV show to the relationships, and the characters have all the depth of an African river in mid-summer.

PLOT: Robert De Niro is the straight-arrow veteran detective who despises any attempt to portray the police business as anything but completely serious. After a sting gone bad he gets partnered with Eddie Murphy, a cop who really wants to be in showbiz. Enter Rene Russo as a television producer who wants a reality show with real cops, with real action and pizzazz. The increasingly lovely Russo spends her entire part screeching "Ooh! Ooh! Let's do this!" I'm sure it was fun, but there's no 'there' there to her role.

Director Tom Dey, whose only other work was Shanghai Noon, another buddy flick (with Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson) that I liked, and more than Showtime. The fish-out-of-water scenario is better played out with Chan in the West than De Niro's dealing with Hollywood types.

And I know I'm not supposed to care since this is a loose comedy, but the editing was horrible. One scene between the captain and De Niro was so poorly cut that I was just watching the editing, to see how they pieced together the scene from what was obviously many different takes, instead of the seamless look a film is supposed to have.

Yes, there were some funny bits. William Shatner's cameo was cool, playing himself giving De Niro and Murphy tips on how to look like TV cops, although much of it is seen in the trailer. Of course, I'd almost make Showtime worth seeing just to see De Niro's bits in the "confessional," trying to pass the time by making faces and imitating famous movie cops. And there are the requisite out takes before the credits.

Still, it's safe to say I was more than a little disappointed. Close the curtain on this show and wait for the next Rush Hour.

Addendum: No wonder I had so many problems with how this film was pieced together. So did the filmmakers and thespians! This from the Feb. 22, 2002, Entertainment Weekly:

IT�S (ALMOST) SHOWTIME: Tom Dey (Shanghai Noon) may have had Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro for his reality-TV comedy Showtime, but according to Rene Russo, that didn�t mean the production was a slam dunk. �[The movie] started before the script was ready,� says Russo. �I went in on the day of my biggest scene � my first scene in the movie � and they just threw it out. Gone. Done. We ended up writing it in the trailer before we shot it, and I had to memorize four pages of dialogue in minutes. I was totally freaked out. It happened quite a bit.� Dey didn�t return calls for comment and Warner Bros declined to speak of the rewrites, but Russo says that even though the script wasn�t all there, �[Dey] did a really good job. He hung in there.�

I beg to differ on that last bit.