MOVIE REVIEW : Role of the Dice : Comedy: The controversial Andrew Dice Clay sanitizes his stand-up act for ‘Ford Fairlane,’ but it’s a pointless exercise for the Diceman.

Andrew Dice Clay, with his stud pompadour, behemoth leather jacket and heavyweight championship-size belt, wants to be the king of comedy--the Elvis of comedy. In his stand-up act, he’s elevated attitude to a comic style, but his scurrilous riffs are kid stuff compared to, say, Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor.

Those comics used shock and obscenity as a way of expressing social and personal outrage. If you clean up the Diceman’s act, what’s left? He’s an insult comic for people whose range of references extends from nursery rhymes to “The Beverly Hillbillies”--a dirty-minded Don Rickles for the pre-yuppie crowd. In a domain of bums, what honor is there in being king?

In “The Adventures of Ford Fairlane,” (citywide) Clay plays an L.A. private eye who specializes in music industry cases. When a heavy-metal singer dies mysteriously on stage, Clay’s Fairlane follows a line of investigation that wends its way through a gaggle of shock jocks, rappers, groupies and hit men. It’s camp noir, but the director, Renny Harlin, doesn’t allow the jokes, feeble as they are, to take hold. He slam-bangs the action as if he was prepping “Die Hard 2,” so that even Clay’s self-infatuated strut and bleary leer don’t have time to register. The film is pointlessly souped up.

Perhaps Harlin’s pyrotechnics are an admission that Clay can’t hold the screen on his own. If so, he could be wrong. Clay’s star presence may be ersatz, but, these days, who can tell the difference between genuine charisma and flavor-of-the-month celebrity? Media hype creates its own kind of charisma.

Clay, dragging deeply on his cigarettes, twitching his shoulders, is more genial in this movie than in his Diceman stand-up routines; he lifts quite a few lines from his standard stage act, but the overall effect is one of sanitization. As a movie actor, he’s perhaps closer to the King than he realizes. (Priscilla Presley even puts in an appearance.) Like Elvis, he turns himself into a hood with a heart of gold--a teddy bear. In “Ford Fairlane,” (rated R) he includes a scene where he chums it up with a rap group just so we can appreciate that Fairlane is a Friend of the Black Man. There’s also a fatherless boy (Brandon Call) who seems to be in the movie to make Fairlane appear Chaplinesque. (Emphasis on the esque .)

Isn’t it awfully early in Clay’s career to be turning cuddly? The “danger” in his stage act may be selectively bogus--he goes after women and gays and Asians but limits his jabs at blacks to sexual hyperbole, says very little about Jews, Italians, etc. But whatever threat Clay possesses in his stage routines doesn’t work its way into this movie, and that will probably turn out to be a commercial mistake.

It may also be a mistake for Clay to surround himself with nondescript co-stars. With the exception of Gilbert Gottfried’s pathologically hyperactive deejay, no one in the cast has a shred of excitement, and that includes Lauren Holly as Fairlane’s adoring secretary, Wayne Newton as a smarmy record label owner and, alas, the great Morris Day. Only a koala is allowed to upstage Clay, and the bear ends up swinging by a rope.

They got the wrong swinger.

‘THE ADVENTURES OF FORD FAIRLANE’

A Twentieth Century Fox release. Executive producer Michael Levy. Producers Joel Silver and Steve Perry. Director Renny Harlin. Screenplay Daniel Waters and James Cappe & David Arnott, based on characters created by Rex Weiner. Cinematography Oliver Wood. Music Yello. Production design John Vallone. Costumes Marilyn Vance-Straker. Film editor Michael Tronick. With Andrew Dice Clay, Wayne Newton, Priscilla Presley, Morris Day, Lauren Holly, Gilbert Gottfried.

Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (younger than 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.)