Get Carter

GET CARTER —* 1/2 — Sylvester Stallone, Rachael Leigh Cook, Miranda Richardson, Alan Cumming, Mickey Rourke, Michael Caine, Gretchen Mol, Rhona Mitra; rated R (violence, profanity, sex, drug use); Carmike 12, Cottonwood Mall and Ritz 15 Theaters; Century Theatres 16; Cinemark Jordan Landing Theaters; Gateway 8 Cinemas; Loews Cineplex Midvalley, South Towne Center and Trolley Corners Cinemas; Redwood Drive-in (with "Bait").

Jesse Helms is going to love "Get Carter." He may be the only one.

Every single character in the movie smokes, ensuring a rich crop of consumers for Helms' home state's government-supported cash crop. Helms will also be delighted that, in the movie, pornographers get wasted and billionaires get all the breaks.

The billionaires and pornographers are in Seattle, where Sylvester Stallone is a guy named Carter who's trying to figure out who killed his brother. Stallone, whose skin is the color of raw sirloin and who appears not to have slept since "Rocky," is meant to be the moral center of the movie, but there are two problems with that. He's a vicious killer, for starters, but, even more distractingly, he has to wade through way too many scenes in which show-offy camera work turns him upside down or flashes lights at him.

You understand why the pyrotechnics are being used — to distract us from the dumbness of the dialogue — but eventually you feel like shouting, "Let's get to the bloodbath, already!"

The dialogue isn't just garden-variety dumb, either. It's really dumb. Here's Stallone, comforting his niece (Rachael Leigh Cook) and sounding like Monday through Friday of a platitude-of-the-day calendar: "It is what it is. We can't change history. You just get past it. It's all up ahead. It's all new."

Well, it's not quite all new. Action-wise, "Get Carter" is exactly what you'd expect: squealing tires, a woman who wishes our hero would settle down, broken glass, stylish conjugation of the favorite curse word from the Tarantino school of writing, bullet shells, The End.

The whole thing has been photographed with "arty" gray filters that make Seattle look like they replaced all the green parts with blue.

The blue-ish cast is surprisingly strong. Surrounded by high-powered actors (Miranda Richardson, Alan Cumming, Mickey Rourke and Michael Caine in exactly the kind of lousy, take-the-money-and-run role he promised the 1999 Golden Globes audience he wouldn't do again), Stallone, wisely, underplays his lines. But he he does it so effectively that he gets lost in all the visual hoo-haw that surrounds him.

Sure, we understand why director Stephen T. Kay indulges in all the trickery, but that doesn't make us enjoy the movie any more. We want him to tell us a story but, instead, he's just blowing smoke.

"Get Carter" is rated R for violence, sexually suggestive scenes, drug use and raw language. Running time: 102 minutes.