SCANT INTELLIGENT LIFE IN 'MARS': STARRY CAST CAN'T SAVE TIM BURTON'S INTERPLANETARY GAGS

By Peter Stack

From The San Francisco Chronicle, 12.13.1996, Final Edition

3 Star Rating

Mars Attacks! should have been titled Tim Burton Attacks.

This messy science fiction comedy, opening today at Bay Area theaters, blows most of its inspired moments because of its mean-spirited, deafening siege mentality, which turns rich promise into a tiresome parade of half-baked skits. Hilarity never seemed so tedious.

It's surprising that Burton's romp--based loosely on an obscure 1960s Topps bubble-gum trading-card series--generates so little heat, considering that the movie stars Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening and many more heavyweights. But although they're overwhelmed by a hodgepodge of pyrotechnic and laser special effects--plus leaden puppetlike Martians--none of the all-star cast is given much of real use to work with.

Burton's rubbery plastic Martians, pint-sized bipeds who arrive one day in hundreds of aluminum flying saucers, seem to be the main reason for the film's existence. Ultimately they're not much more interesting than rubber duckies, though they do some arresting stuff, such as indiscriminately vaporizing humans and animals with ray guns. They also attach Sarah Jessica Parker's head to a Chihuahua, whereupon she kisses the disembodied head of Pierce Brosnan.

The Martians are bullies with bulbous brain matter visible through clear plastic- bubble craniums. They speak a staccato language resembling ducks quacking. They get off on mowing down earthlings, even when the latter greet them in a spirit of peace. The death-to-humans concept is perversely funny for a while, then turns tiresome.

Almost in spite of itself, though, Mars Attacks! has a silly, adolescent satirical appeal in its manic attacks on pop culture. It jabs at old-movie and TV science fiction, the pomp of the executive branch in Washington, the extravagant kitsch of Las Vegas.

And the film occasionally shows brilliant insight into humankind's cloddish approach to the cosmos. In this, the script by Jonathan Gems has a consistently provocative H.G. Wells attitude, turned on its ear.

The title pretty much tells the story. The opening credit sequence showing squadrons of saucers leaving the reddish environment of their home planet and heading for Earth is really all you need to see--it's a knockout.

Nicholson has dual roles, a thoughtful president of the United States who worries about what suit to wear to greet the invaders, and a slick Vegas casino developer. Close, in the running for the year's best ham award, plays the first lady. In Vegas, Bening is great as Nicholson's wife, a 12- step advocate chasing New Age cosmologies.

The president's advisers are a super- hawkish nuke-'em general played by Rod Steiger, a more liberal general (Paul Winfield), a sleazeball Oval Office spin doctor (Martin Short) and Brosnan as a scientist who believes that the Martians deserve respect.

Parker is a ditzy TV fashion-talk-show hostess married to a TV news reporter played by Michael J. Fox. The amazingly buff Jim Brown plays a casino greeter in Vegas, and somewhere in the mess lounge lizard Tom Jones shows up to find out that his backup singers are aliens.

Others wasted talents are Lukas Haas as a Kansas hayseed and Sylvia Sidney as his absentminded grandmother whose musical tastes turn the tide against the Martians. Lisa Marie is featured in an amusing, twisted sequence as a seductive Martian dressed as a D.C. hooker.

The PG-13 rating was given for cartoonish violence, body dismemberment, depictions of cruelty to animals, vulgar language and a couple of suggestive adult moments.