The Adventures of Huck Finn

The Adventures of Huck Finn

“Around the World with Ford Fairlane” is a show about my least favorite hero chasing villains I didn’t like in a story I couldn’t follow. Also, it’s loud, ugly and mean; this makes it the perfect setting for Andrew Dice Clay, whose jokes consist of hating people not present to entertain those who are.

The story revolves around Clay as a “rock ‘n’ roll detective” whose name comes from one of those 1962 Fords with the hard tops that fold down into the trunk. He has an office up on Sunset Boulevard somewhere above the body shops, and he spends his nights going to rock concerts and nightclubs looking for clients, suspects and action. He gets plenty of action: One motif involves his habit of swallowing women (usually two at a time) and spitting them out again in the morning.

Fairlane has a client but no girlfriend named Jazz (Lauren Holly), who waits patiently back at the office while he’s out on cases. He also has that private eye’s knack for serving as a narrator, and so we hear his voice-over on the sound track as he describes in world-weary tones this dog-eared old world he lives in.

The movie opens with an onstage murder during which a heavy-metal singer electrocutes himself; investigating the case leads Fairlane into tangents involving Wayne Newton as a corrupt music executive; Morris Day (funny in “Purple Rain,” muted here) as a record producer; Maddie Corman as a bubble gum blowing teenager whose abduction worries her dad (Gilbert Gottfried), a shock-jock whose on the air murder at first sounds like another one of his gags.

The cast is crawling with walk-ons some of whom (like Sheila E.) you can barely recognize. Others include Robert Englund (Freddy in the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series), and Priscilla Presley, very pretty in the underwritten role of a seductress who goes astraddle Fairlane’s case.

The movie is cheap. It isn’t inexpensive. The director is Renny Harlin, whose “Die Hard 2: Die Harder” is also in theaters right now, and he shoots mostly at night, in a neon world peopled by hundreds of bizarre extras. Through this human shrubbery strides Fairlane, a cigarette always hanging from his mouth; he must go through cartons every day, since he never smokes more than the first half-inch, and lights some cigarettes just so he can disdainfully throw them away. Clay uses language like an insult comic with a grudge; the screenplay’s uncounted obscenities fly out of his mouth like barks from an angry dog a dog that has only one thing to say and keeps saying it over and over again until you understand him.

For a music movie, “Around the World with Ford Fairlane” has very little music in it. There’s an endless score by Yello (I liked it), but not much performance footage; Sheila E. gets one phrase of one song on camera, and Vince Neil of Motley Crue gets another phrase, and Clay bellows half a rock number but Harlin doesn’t go for any of those wonderfully cheesy Detroit production numbers we’ve come to know and love. There isn’t even an uninterrupted musical number in this movie usually they’re interrupted before they can finish, either by violence or because somebody vomits on somebody.

Which makes each scene feel less like the setup for another number than simply odd.

The challenge in the movie is for Clay to remain his stage/club persona while also presenting himself as a believable hero. He does this by occasionally being nice to his secretary, befriending an unsupervised little boy and making fun of some of his own mannerisms (he lights cigarettes in this weirdly choreographed tic jerk spasm motion). Is this a good movie?

No. Does Andrew Dice Clay have a future in movies? Yes, as an actor. He’s got presence, he’s at ease onscreen but he’s going to wear out his welcome very quickly because the character isn’t likable to begin with and there is nowhere else for him to go from there.

Onstage or in a club, racially abusive and foul-mouthed, he implicates everyone except the audience; they laugh to exempt themselves (anyone who doesn’t laugh is ipso facto an a-e). But people at the movies are isolated from one another more contemplative more likely sitting alone in the dark not being entertained but appalled.

If you want any kind of future whatsoever on-screen Mr. Dice then here’s what you need: Stop playing yourself.

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