Chris Kattan in "Corky Romano."

MOVIE INFORMATION

With 10 as a must-see, we give this film a: Stars: Chris Kattan, Peter Falk, Peter Berg, and Chris Penn Director: Rob Pritts Rated: PG-13, with profanity, drug use and sex-related humor Length: 86 minutes

ROCHESTERCRITIQUE

Having seen this film, how would you rate it? 10 5 9 4 8 3 7 2 6 1

By Eleanor O'Sullivan
Gannett News Service

(October 12, 2001) -- Corky Romano answers a question heard often before: Can a late-night comedy star carry a big-ticket feature film?

Yes, but only up to a point. Chris Kattan, the Roxbury Guy, Mango, and Mr. Peppers of Saturday Night Live, squirms and flounces his way through Corky Romano, often to very funny effect. He's playing the stumblebum but good-hearted son of a Mafia don who needs a spy in the FBI to find out what the feds have on him.

Hello?

Kattan's Corky is the man for the job, or rather, the man-child, a dork who minces around like Pee-wee Herman on a particularly frenetic day. Armed with a phony resume that claims he can speak Mandarin and can disarm 300-pound perpetrators, Corky penetrates the FBI and amazingly is assigned its highest-profile, most challenging cases. Clearly, this is a bad time for the FBI to be portrayed as clueless and easily impressed.

Corky is so tied up putting out FBI fires that he barely has time to find out what the agency has on his father (Peter Falk), a crude, pint-size Don Corleone. Corky's useless brothers, Paulie and Peter, are portrayed by Peter Berg and Chris Penn as if they were constantly muffling laughs over Kattan's goofy pratfalls and the script's absurdities. The script (by David Garrett and Jason Ward) finds it amusing that beefy Paulie should be a "latent homosexual." On surveillance stakeouts of their brother's progress, Paulie gets distracted and photographs men's buttocks. Spare us.

But there is Kattan to amuse us. The beautiful part of Kattan's talent is that he can make you laugh while he somehow fells ridiculously dangerous felons, uncovers the trickiest plots or clumsily woos the beautiful Agent Russo (Vinessa Shaw).

Director Rob Pritts squeezes every ounce from Kattan's talent for manic physical comedy. Kattan is brilliantly out of control when Corky accidentally gets doped-up on a stash of cocaine and then must lecture a group of itchy second graders on how the FBI works. The look of shock on the kids' faces is one for the books.

Like so many of his SNL predecessors who made it in movies, Kattan is bigger and better than the film around him.

Corky Romano is a low-brow exercise that basically boils down to a series of sketches built around Kattan's gift for artful clumsiness. When you have a minute to evaluate the movie as a whole, you realize the writing is pedestrian, the set-ups are predictable and the supporting players, especially Falk, seem to be killing time while they wait for their paycheck from Touchstone Pictures.