MOVIE REVIEW : EX-CON RE-ENTERS SOCIETY IN ‘STICK’

When a film with little sense and no content is a ruination, the sense of loss isn’t particularly acute. But the basis of “Stick,” by tough-yarn writer Elmore Leonard, was a little beauty of a story about an ex-con who finds himself completely out of step with the world after years on the inside.

It was a hot, fast read with pungent characters and a particular code of honor as one of its central tenets. Above all, it felt real. Unfortunately, to fit what are seen to be the particular requirements of its director/co-star Burt Reynolds, “Stick” (citywide) has been rendered jokey, flaccid and, the worst crime of all, deadly slow. All this in spite of the fact that Leonard was the original screenwriter.

For an outsider to speculate on what went wrong is hazardous at best. Certainly, hiring Leonard to do the adaptation was a sound idea by producer Jennings Lang. However, Leonard is now listed as co-screenwriter with Joseph C. Stinson, and the story has suffered drastic changes. What is clear is that the film is alternately torpid or overplayed and also that the essential essence of the ex-armed robber, Ernest (Stick) Stickley, has been fatally tampered with. Stick should not be a macho savior, but a man with a dangerously short fuse whose reactions are almost a decade out of date. One of the central questions is how (or even if) he can readjust to a very different world from the one he left.

To his credit, and unlike several other director-stars, Reynolds has not made “Stick” into a vanity piece: He doesn’t use his camera to linger lovingly on himself. It’s small comfort, however, since he doesn’t use his camera in a way that could remotely be called interesting, either. (Compare “Stick’s” sequence on a Miami high-rise balcony with the prowling, insinuating camera work in “The Hit,” which freezes you with its menace.)

The story follows just-paroled Stick on a fast freight back home to Miami, where his first encounter is with ex-prison buddy and close friend Rainy (the splendid Jose Perez of “Short Eyes” and “Steambath”). Rainy has more than once been the money-runner between grotesque drug-dealer Chucky (Charles Durning) and Nestor (Castulo Guerra), his evil and dangerous supplier.

The outcome of Rainy’s next run, with Stick riding shotgun, changes the course of Stick’s life. He is left to settle what he feels is a debt of honor and in that pursuit he runs into enough “characters” for three Raymond Chandler novels.

They include George Segal as a blowhard Miami millionaire and crime groupie, who likes a certain proximity to criminals but on a no-risk basis; Candice Bergen, as Segal’s smart and elegant financial adviser; Richard Lawson as Segal’s houseman, another parolee, and stunt man/actor Dar Robinson as a murderous albino gunman.

Unfortunately, the actors (Reynolds and Bergen excepted) seem to be playing Shtick, shouting, posing and posturing up to and beyond the point of endurance. And their clothes and makeup turn character into caricature. One sight of that bunny-eyed albino walking around downtown Miami outfitted like Jack Palance in “Shane” and you’d lock him up just on general principles. And Durning gets a pink-orange wig, seemingly styled for Emily Dickinson, and Kenneth Macmillan’s “Dune” eyebrows.

In addition to peculiar transmutation, the film carries almost no sense that, in Leonard you have a writer with a deadly accurate ear and a lovely rhythm. You get only hints of it: Bergen’s coolly amused description of social life for a rich, unmarried woman in Miami; the banter between Stick and Rainy, the business of the chauffeurs’ stock-market tip circuit, based on what information they can vacuum up from back-seat conversations.

On the other hand, there are the scenes between Stick and his 15-year-old daughter, a private-school student whom he has to get to know again. The daughter is played by Tricia Leigh Fisher, who seems to have inherited every ounce of her ability from her father, Eddie Fisher.

From having been directed at an agonizingly slow pace up to this point, by the close everything careens out of control. There’s one piece of absolutely unnecessary brutality between the albino super-villain and Segal’s maid--by this time no one needed more examples that this was the scummiest man alive--and a James Bond finale complete with machine guns, attacking scorpions and plummeting stunt men. It doesn’t help.