"Analyze This" Blu-ray Movie Review

Blu-ray Movie Review

“Analyze This”

Directed by Harold Ramis, written by Ramis, Peter Tolan and Kenneth Lonergan, 106 minutes, rated R.

By Christopher Smith

Harold Ramis’ 1999 comedy, “Analyze This,” is now out on Blu-ray disc, and the silence you hear is that nobody cares. The clarity high definition offers confirms it--the movie remains a bust.

Back in the day, the parallels were obvious. The film features Robert De Niro as a mobster so deeply conflicted and emotionally unstable, he pours his heart out to a shrink. Meanwhile, on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” the deeply conflicted and emotionally unstable mobster Tony Soprano poured his heart out to a shrink.

Obviously, someone got shrunk here--and it wasn’t HBO.

“Analyze This” is a fitting title for a film whose writers could have benefited by popping some Prozac before sitting down to pen the film’s only occasionally funny script. The film does boast an inspired opening and a few clever moments, but too often it plays it safe, falling victim to a cliched formula that spoils what could have been a witty comedy.

With Billy Crystal doing his familiar shtick as De Niro’s psychiatrist, the film’s big loss was Ramis’ decision not to use Lisa Kudrow as an active participant, but as set decoration--in this film, her comic talents are wasted. She’s just Crystal’s unhappy, misunderstood finance, a pretty smile in pretty clothes who moves about prettily while offering the occasional bitchy line of dialogue.

If only the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov had lived to direct this film. Imagine the inspired simplicity of it: Set up the joke, ring a bell, make us laugh. That’s one conditioned response this film lacks.


Grade: C+