December 6, 2002 | If you enjoyed Analyze This, the hugely successful 1999 comedy about a mood-swinging mobster and his easily frazzled analyst, you may appreciate a second helping of the same shtick in Analyze That, a sequel that dutifully reprises just about every element of its predecessor. The new movie comes off as a faded carbon copy, enhanced with only one or two fresh jokes. With Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal back in the mix, however, the warmed-over goulash is tasty more often than not.
De Niro, who recently has evolved – almost miraculously – into a snorting, slow-burning comic presence in all manner of broadly written farces, returns as Paul Vitti, a brutish crime boss who’s often overwhelmed by free-floating anxieties. In Analyze This, Vitti sought professional help from Dr. Ben Sobol (Crystal), a psychiatrist who helped the made man get in touch with his inner child. In Analyze That, Vitti returns to the scene of the crime, so to speak, by using Sobol as his ticket out of prison.
The basic premise – Vitti is nearly killed behind bars by minions of a rival mobster, so he fakes insanity to be released into Sobol’s care – merely is an excuse for De Niro and Crystal to slip back into the comic grooves they perused in the previous movie. On the other hand, it’s also just cause for De Niro to get a few good laughs while Vitti indicates his instability by singing – very badly – songs from West Side Story.
Almost frighteningly eager to satirize every tough guy or good fella he’s ever essayed on screen, De Niro once again plays Vitti as a most reluctant candidate for psychoanalysis, a guy whose idea of “opening up” usually involves the surgical use of a chainsaw. And Crystal, effortlessly effective in another hand-tooled role, once again plays Sobol as an insecure wisenheimer whose weapon of choice is straight-faced sarcasm.
Trouble is, neither De Niro nor Crystal can do much to break free of the patterns for comic patter that were firmly established in Analyze This. Every so often, Sobol has an angry confrontation with Vitti or another underworld type, but his eruptions of rage are timidly doused by his self-preservation instinct. Every so often, Vitti punches, curses or simply intimidates someone, and his aggressive behavior is intended as a punchline for an overly familiar joke. Ho-hum.
It’s obvious that director Harold Ramis (another Analyze This alumnus) and his screenwriters didn’t want to do anything that might dilute the potency of a sure-fire formula. Trouble is, Analyze That is so hamstrung by precedent, it occasionally feels less like a first sequel than the fourth or fifth installment of a long-running franchise.
Potato-faced Joe Viterelli is back as Jelly, Vitti’s faithful goombah, and that’s a good thing. Unfortunately, Lisa Kudrow is back as Sobol’s snippy wife, and that’s a bad, bad thing. (Query: Is the character meant to be that obnoxious, or does Kudrow bring out the worst in her?)
Among the newcomers, Cathy Moriarty-Gentile – cleverly reunited with De Niro, her Raging Bull co-star – is aptly brassy as a crime family boss who must shoulder the dual burdens of being “a single parent and a career woman.” And Anthony LaPaglia, an actor often described as “a young Robert De Niro,” has a very amusing unbilled cameo as the star of a Sopranos-like TV series that employs Vitti as a technical adviser.
It comes as no surprise, by the way, that Vitti is very good, maybe even too good, at his job.
