Hollywood isn't laughing with us, folks. It's laughing at us.

Review: No time for 'Showtime'

(CNN) -- You'd think people can't define "satire" anymore, based on the evidence of "Showtime," an empty cop movie spoof that could have been a momentous first-time teaming of Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro.

The aimless screenplay by Keith Sharon, Alfred Gough, and Miles Millar relies on easy sarcasm that's more suitable to an overpaid second-stringer like Martin Lawrence than two of the better actors currently working in movies.

But that's only part of the problem.

Director Tom Dey pretends to make fun of a film-industry formula while hedging his bets by staging booming cliches without a trace of irony. It's hard to tell exactly what the joke is supposed to be.

Things start out well, anyway. In the opening scene, we see Los Angeles police investigator Mitch Preston (De Niro), mundanely telling a classroom of elementary schoolchildren that his job on the street is nothing like what they see in the movies. He doesn't jump from rooftop to rooftop while pursuing bad guys, he says, and he seldom fires his weapon. Mostly, he just does investigative footwork and fills out reports.

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De Niro is funny here, as he casts a steely gaze at the cowering kids and tells them they're headed for jail if they commit a crime in his city.

Cut to a very pumped-up Eddie Murphy, as patrol officer Trey Sellars. Trey is locked in a cliche-laden argument with a gruff superior, the same scene we've watched in 1,000 bad crime movies over the years: His partner has been shot and killed just as he was reaching retirement, and the chief wants Trey, a loose cannon, to surrender his badge and gun before he tries to take revenge.

Murphy wails and cries at the injustice of it all, then we realize that Trey, who fancies himself an actor, is auditioning for a network TV show. He doesn't get the part, because he's terrible, but Trey still dreams of being a star.

Bad dreams

Then you suddenly start watching exactly what Mitch says never happens to him -- and exactly the movie that Trey was so comically incapable of performing for those TV producers.

Trey and Mitch meet when an undercover drug deal that Mitch is involved in goes wrong. Out of nowhere, one of the drug dealers whips out a bazooka-like rifle contraption that must weigh about forty pounds. He shoots the room full of huge, metal-piercing bullets that destroy everything in their path. Mitch chases the guy into an alley, but is stopped by Trey, who thinks he's one of the crooks. This eventually leads to Mitch, who has no time for foolishness, shooting a TV news reporter's camera, an act of defiance that gets him into hot water with his (you guessed it) gruff superior.

Mitch's assault makes the evening news, on which he's noticed by Chase Renzi (Rene Russo), a calculating producer who wants to team him with a partner and follow him around for a reality TV show. Mitch's superiors force him to participate because the network is threatening to sue the police force over the camera-shooting incident. It's not long before Chase selects Trey as Mitch's self-consciously macho cohort. Then Chase proceeds to gussy up the new partners, a process that includes being trained in police procedures by William Shatner (as himself, in T.J. Hooker mode), and driving free luxury cars that look cool when they pull up to a crime scene.

Meanwhile, a shifty Latino nightclub owner (Pedro Damian) -- who manufactured that massive gun and has many more of them -- is rather haphazardly shooting up places, just so the audience doesn't have to sit there the whole time without seeing some explosions.

Honestly, now. How are you supposed to respond when a movie that's supposedly mocking media misrepresentation of police work has a scene in which a victim's front door is nailed shut, then his entire house is blown to bits by seven or eight steely-eyed guys firing high-tech bazookas?

The house falls on top of him. Why bother establishing genuine reality and having Russo push De Niro and Murphy into a false one, when their everyday job contains something this ludicrous? The endless banter and overdone car chases lead to a face-off at a massive gun show, by the way.

Repeat offenses

Does any of this make a bit of sense?

No, it doesn't.

This is a movie about movies, and its oddly garbled message asks more questions than it answers. Are we supposed to laugh at the cartoon violence, or applaud its inclusion in yet another big, vacant action picture?

And doesn't pointing out how dumb this stuff is -- only to repeatedly revel in it -- suggest that the audience itself is supposed to be dumb?

It's getting harder and harder to ignore the fact that Hollywood isn't laughing with us, folks. It's laughing at us.

"Showtime" opens Friday and is broadly violent, but there's little blood. There's also some profanity. Although Murphy and De Niro fans may chuckle a bit, this one is tailor-made for video night. God bless the fast-forward button.

Warner Bros., a sister AOL Time Warner company to CNN, is a production and distribution participant in this film.