Starring Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Charlie Hofheimer, Nastassja Kinski and Julia Louis-Dreyfus Directed by Ivan Reitman Rated PG-13, with profanity and sexual references Running time 98 minutes Jack gives this film a rating of 6 out of 10

(May 9, 1997) -- Robin Williams and Billy Crystal are two of the funniest guys on the planet. Ivan Reitman is an experienced comedy director with hits like Ghostbusters and Twins to his credit. The highly regarded screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel have adapted a clever, popular French film.

With all that going for it, Fathers' Day should be fabulous. And it is amusing, even intermittently hilarious. How can it NOT be with Robin Williams exploding comic brain synapses all over the place? The film just is not the consistent comic masterpiece you'd expect from such pervasive talent.

Fathers' Day adapts the 1984 Francis Veber film, Les Comperes, which found moderate success at U.S. art houses. In both cases, it is about the wacky efforts of two misfits to find the missing teen-age boy each thinks is his son. They have been called into action by the boy's worried mother -- a woman neither guy has seen in 17 years.

In the new version, Williams and Crystal play the roles originated by Gerard Depardieu and Pierre Richard. Williams is Dale, a timid manic-depressive and failed playwright still maintaining elements of his flower-child youth. Crystal is Jack, a successful if somewhat uptight courtroom attorney.

The missing boy's mother (Nastassja Kinski) calls each in succession, confiding that the boy may be the son of one of the two men and recruiting them to search California's Bay area for the kid. They discover he's among a group of teens trailing after a rock band, so Dale and Jack hit the concert scene, checking out appearances in San Francisco, Sacramento and Reno.

Along the way, they find the boy, they lose the boy, they find the boy again, and they lose him again, in a series of miscues that grows a touch tiresome. By the time the teen-age boy (Charlie Hofheimer) becomes embroiled with dangerous drug dealers -- after he steals their $5,000 -- you're going to find you don't really care. And that's just as well, because Reitman and his writers skirt the issue by film's end, never really resolving the $5,000 subplot.

Fortunately, each time the uneven haphazard plot threatens to collapse, Williams saves the day with another wacky aside or a bit of ingenious physical comedy that reminds you of one of the chief reasons you came to see the film in the first place.

By comparison, Billy Crystal pales. He seems willing here to play straightman to his longtime friend. Nothing he does in Fathers' Day is half as funny as the first ten minutes of the recent Oscar telecast.

Co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus (of Seinfeld) is given even less to do as Crystal's understanding current wife. As thin as this part is conceived, she could have phoned it in.