Four directors and a big mess

THE CRITICS FILM

THE NEW Tarantino movie is a dog - an unreserved one rather than a Reservoir. A compilation of four short films, each set in a different room of the same hotel, it's written and directed by divers hands, but has a uniform tawdry ineptness. Four Rooms (18) lets slip its true intentions - to cash in on Quentin's cool - in its opening animated credit sequence (always a bad sign - remember Man Trouble's jaunty cartoon mutt?). The figure of Tim Roth's bellboy, the link between the rooms as he scurries to provide service, peels out of a caricature of Tarantino in his Dogs dark suit. To be fair, Tarantino's segment, the final one, is the strongest. But before getting to this room many viewers will already be wanting to check out.

The story-lines are startlingly slim. In the opener, "The Missing Ingredient" (directed by Allison Gas Food Lodging Anders), a bunch of modern-day witches (including Madonna) pour libations, in the Honeymoon Suite, to their goddess, a 1950s stripper (Amanda De Cadenet, I kid you not). It transpires that one of them has failed to bring the appropriate life fluid to the bath- tub that is being used for a cauldron. She sets about seducing Roth, to make use of his precious sperm. And that's about it: a piece of salacious froth with a scattering of bare breasts and some familiar special effects (blue X-rays gunning from a witch's eyes; some fire-breathing). The missing ingredient is an ounce of wit.

Worse is to come with Alexandre Rockwell's "The Wrong Man", a sketch that is less amusing and well-crafted than most people's home movies. Here Roth brings a bucket of ice up to a hood with a gun (David Proval), who accuses Roth of having an affair with his wife (Jennifer Beals). Beals is bound to a chair (both this and Tarantino's sketch, where the word "bitch" is only outscored by obscenities, are casually misogynistic). There is an air of desperation to Rockwell's direction (especially his skewed camera angles), as though he had given up on his own script - entirely understandable. Here, and throughout, Roth battles gamely, with twitchy movements and squealing speech, but his falsetto posturing can't make up for the lack of a character.

Things look up a bit with "The Misbehavers", from Robert Rodriguez, director of El Mariachi. Two kids are left in their room by their menacing father (Antonio Banderas), with the strict injunction that they are to be safely in bed by midnight. An evening of mayhem follows with the discovery of an adult channel on the television, a hypodermic syringe in a drawer, and a corpse under the bed. The chief pleasure of this piece is in Banderas's charismatic, sleekly brutal performance, and in the closing tableau of chaos. Still, I couldn't help feeling it had all been done better in Home Alone, or even in that Yellow Pages advertisement, when a teenager's mates run amok while his parents are returning from holiday.

Characteristically, Tarantino has found the inspiration for his segment in an old episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Show. The skit is stuffed with Tarantino's trademark pop-cultural pet references - from Quadrophenia to Jerry Lewis. Tarantino himself plays a hot-shot Hollywood actor, who has hired a penthouse suite with cronies including Bruce Willis. The sketch opens with a pair of naked women fleeing the room, and we sense that the guys are searching for a new thrill. They find it by resurrecting the bet between Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre in Hitchcock's "The Man From Rio" episode - that McQueen couldn't light his lighter 10 times in a row. The stakes: Lorre's car against McQueen's little finger.

Tarantino brings the piece to a wonderfully witty conclusion. But what leads up to it is well below his best. The Hollywood money-talk (a movie "is testing right to the ceiling") has all been heard before; and even the profanity, the odd flourish apart, lacks its usual zing. One other point. Tarantino is a superb writer, a good director, and an average actor: why does he spend so much time performing now?

Portmanteau movies rarely hold together (Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini and Gregoretti's 1962 RoGoPaG may be the exception), tending to offer odd pearls amid the mud of mediocrity. Most people remember the Michael Redgrave ventriloquist section from Dead of Night, and Martin Scorsese's "Life Lessons" from New York Stories. Such films tend to add up to less than the sum of their parts. But in Four Rooms the parts are worthless anyway. Nothing comes of nothing.

What is the appeal of Jim Carrey? Or, put more crudely: what makes a man worth $20 million a movie? The first point that has to be conceded about Carrey is that he is extraordinary. From his first entrance in Ace Ventura - When Nature Calls (PG), Carrey's features are as contorted as his strange sculpted quiff. He turns his rubbery face into a grotesque cartoon animal. At first glance, Carrey is the class jester writ large - gone universal. The plot of the new movie finds him in Africa, investigating a missing bat and cocking a snook at Simon Callow's pompous consul general, a combination of jodhpurs and moustache. Carrey's comic darts are dipped in anti-establishment venom. He is the comedian of the Tarantino generation, turning up his nose (and many other parts of his infinitely malleable body) at traditional culture.

Carrey's best moments in the new film are pieces of visual invention: wrestling with a crocodile or playing the jungle drums with his head. Some of his routines recall Chaplin, as does his self-regard. Added to this there is an Animal House streak of gross-out humour (putting his arm in an animal's mouth down to the elbow). It is all done with unrelenting energy and (almost) irresistible verve. But something disturbs me: Ace is a pet detective, and the flip-side of his care for animals seems to be a contempt for human beings. Carrey's anarchic shtick is tinged with misanthropy. He doesn't relate to other actors, using them as props. He races through speeches without pause for breath - a slap in the face of movie convention, but also of the viewer.

Ace Ventura - When Nature Calls closes with Sting singing of "Spirits in the Material World", and the movie is big on spirituality (Carrey rails, albeit goofily, against "appetites of the flesh"). But the high ideals feel like a form of nihilism. That may be why the film, for all its pace, slickness, and smart minor roles (Ian McNeice sweats his way through as a plump colonial officer), remains rather joyless.

The Indian in the Cupboard (PG) is a great idea, betrayed by lacklustre scripting and production values. A boy (the unprepossessing Hal Scardino) inherits a small cupboard which has the power, at the turn of a key, to switch toys into human beings. Soon he has a Lilliputian Indian brave (Litefoot) for a mate. The script, by Melissa Mathison, who wrote ET, is flimsy and repetitive (confirming how much ET's success was down to Spielberg's diligence). There are nice visual effects - the Indian shinning his way down a lamp flex, for instance - and likeable performances from David Keith as a cowboy and Steve Coogan (seemingly cast more for his versatility than his wit) as a tin soldier. But otherwise this cupboard is bare.

Still looking for a gift for a serious-minded film enthusiast? Index on Censorship's special issue The Subversive Eye (pounds 7.99 at bookshops), devoted to film censorship, may be the answer. A global array of film- makers debate this contentious issue. Some of the shrewdest contributions come from Roman Polanski, digging deeper than he has in recent films, and the moral philosopher Bernard Williams, drawing a distinction between the potency of cinema and video. There's even a dash of humour, provided by the genially subversive John Waters. He recalls a Baltimore censor's boast about her qualifications: "Don't tell me about sex, I was married to an Italian."

`Four Rooms': opens 26 Dec, at Chelsea (0171 351 3742); Odeons Kensington (0171 371 3166), Swiss Cottage (0171 722 5905); Whiteleys (0990 888990); Warner West End (0171 437 4343); from 27 Dec, at MGMs Fulham Rd (0181 970 6011), Haymkt (0181 970 6016); Screen/Green (0171 226 3520). `Ace Ventura': opens 26 Dec, at MGM Troc (0181 970 6015); Odeons Kens, Swiss Cottage; Whiteleys; Warner West End; from 27 Dec, at MGM Fulham Rd, Screen/Baker St (0171 935 2772). Other cinema details: Review, page 48.