Striptease

You have no doubt encountered the advertising for "Striptease," which assures the audience that the film is a comedy and that it's no "Showgirls."

It's understandable that the filmmakers of this melodrama-thriller-comedy would like to distance themselves from last year's NC-17 disaster. Sadly, however, for all the film's stabs at broad comedy and its ambition in terms of story layers, "Striptease" is a mishmash of failed gags, uneven performances and boring strip-club sequences.

This is the notorious picture for which Demi Moore was paid $121/2 million, making her the highest paid actress in movie history. And yes, she does have a couple of topless scenes . . . as if that's unique to this film.

Moore plays a desperate south Florida woman who has lost her job as an FBI secretary because her ex-husband (Robert Patrick) is a felon. Yet he has managed to finagle legal custody of their young daughter (Moore's real-life daughter, Rumer), whom he uses in a scam to steal wheelchairs.

Why does the judge grant Patrick custody? Because Patrick is also a police informant, and because Moore has no job. Right.

In truth, however, Moore isn't unemployed. She's working at a strip joint, but she's only doing it for the money.

And besides, she's a class act - even if she is working in a dive. While her fellow strippers, all played as dense bimbos, perform raunchy routines, Moore dances provocatively to the greatest hits of Annie Lennox (there are no fewer than four Lennox songs on the soundtrack).

The boss prefers the basics (he tries to get his "girls" to wrestle in a pit of creamed corn), but he lets Moore do her thing because - for reasons he can't fathom - the regulars like her.

The primary subplot has a lecherous, goofball congressman (white-haired Burt Reynolds) lusting after Moore - offering her a full-time position as his mistress. He's also in the pocket of local mobsters, who are bumping off witnesses to his debauchery. (At one point, Reynolds goes into ecstasy after smearing himself with Vaseline and sniffing dryer lint that has been taken from the laundromat Moore frequents.)

Reynolds is obviously having fun with his out-of-control character, but the congressman is just too sleazy to be likable.

Screenwriter-director Andrew Bergman, who has fared much better with "Honeymoon in Vegas," "The Freshman" and "It Could Happen to You," seems to be at sea adapting Carl Hiaasen's popular novel. The film vacillates from being a violent thriller to a slapstick comedy to a poignant drama, but Bergman is unable to mesh these disparate elements.