Not a great return

This sequel to Analyze This runs 95 minutes: there must be 95 "f**ks" uttered in that time. You can always tell a film's contempt for its target audience when it thinks casual obscenity is the same as wit. I don't recall the first film being as foul-mouthed, brutal and unfunny.

Robert De Niro reprises his Mafioso who's afflicted with chronic anxiety, this time with good reason: other Mafiosi want to send him to sleep with the fishes. To get out of jail, where the hit men are thick as sharks, he fakes a breakdown, sings West Side Story's lyrics and is released into the care of his reluctant Jewish analyst, played again by Billy Crystal, a shrink more used to treating neurotic soccer mums and alcoholic gentiles.

At first, it simply looks like another abrasive rematch between the two cultures, Freud and Capone; but The Sopranos have exhausted the joke of middle-class suburban killers-with-problems, so the film does an about-turn steal from that TV show which involves De Niro as "consultant" to a gangster saga being shot on the mean streets of NYC.

There's a lot more, to do with hijacking gold bars (pronounced "bully-yon"), but not much you can't guess, or haven't seen umpteen times.

The stars are on autopilot - Crystal comes off better, since stand-up comedy is his shtick. De Niro looks as if one "take" was all he was prepared to give: it's the first film in which the comedy "out-takes" on the end credits of the stars' blowing their lines or "corpsing" actually look better than the main movie. Harold Ramis directs as if he wanted to get home for dinner early.

There are a few amusing moments, like the Mob widow (Cathy Moriarty-Gentile) giving De Niro a big hug that turns into a savvy frisking for any heat he might be packing; or De Niro doing a stint as a Fifth Avenue car salesman with the selling line, "You could pack three bodies in the trunk." But too few jokes, too many "f**ks".

Analyze That
Cert: cert15