Showtime film review

certificate_12

SHOWTIME

The most telling moment in this tired and formulaic buddy cop flick comes at the end, during a sequence of outtakes that were marginally more amusing than the film itself. De Niro mugs at the camera and utters his infamous line, "Are you talking to me", before muttering, "didn't someone used to say that?" It was as though he knew that the youthful and edgy Robert De Niro of Taxi Driver had become a very different person from the one who's now content to take a cheque and phone in his performance.

The hope must have been that by teaming De Niro and Murphy as two ill matched cops, paired together to star in a reality TV show, their chemistry would compensate for the script's shortcomings. But despite the explosive action sequences, the two are unable to muster a spark.

"This is America, everybody wants to be on television", proclaims the brassy TV producer Chase Renzi (Rene Russo). Everybody, that is, except the gritty and unassuming detective Mitch Preston (Robert De Niro), who reluctantly finds himself in the spotlight after deliberately shooting a TV camera during a gun battle. Preston's actions inspire Renzi's plan for a police reality show, with cameras following Preston everywhere. Against his wishes, Preston is railroaded into participating by his bosses, who are anxious to avoid a lawsuit from the TV network whose camera Preston destroyed.

To offset Preston's taciturn and drab manner, Renzi decides to pair him up with "a funny minority type". It's the perfect role for the flashy and ambitious Trey Sellars (Eddie Murphy), an inept cop who harbors dreams of becoming an actor. Preston hates Sellars almost as much as he hates the intrusion of cameras, and threatens to shoot him at the slightest provocation. The program, which takes its title from the phrase, "it's showtime", uttered by Sellars before going to work, becomes a hit and the duo become stars, much to Sellars' glee and Preston's annoyance.

Directed by Tom Dey, who fared better with the comic pairing of Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson in Shanghai Noon, Showtime battles against a premise that is too far fetched to sustain belief while offering too few laughs to make it not matter. A garbled subplot involving a drug dealer, a nightclub owner and a supergun does its best to instill some excitement, but in the end Showtime resembles its main character Preston, who when asked, "What makes you tick?" replies emphatically "I don't tick".