The Shadow

Can you spell the word tedium? The Shadow can. This movie also defines the word, because The Shadow is a colossal bore that manages to drain the fun out of one of the zippier superhero concepts ever cooked up by the pulp magazines of the 1930s.

What should have been good, clean, vio­lent entertainment has been scrambled into a sticky mess of incoherent story telling and terrible acting. Only the special effects are outstand­ing, and they're mostly devoted to showing you things that are supposed to be invisible. So the best parts of The Shadow are the things you see the least.

The current version of The Shadow is based more upon the original pulp novels than the old radio series, which means that the movie partakes of the books' more ram­bling structure. The whole concept of the darkly heroic Shadow was slapped together through a decade of hectic writing during the Great Depression, and the movie bor­rows freely from a wide menu of contradic­tory sources. The screenplay by David Koepp {Jurassic Park and Carlito's Way) should have provided plenty of room in which to maneuver, but the plot sputters repeatedly and never goes any place.

The movie is surprisingly incapable of milking a single drop of dramatic interest from the Shadows own murderous, shad­owy past. In this version, Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin) is an American-born war­lord who's killing his way to the top of the Tibetan opium trade. Despite his nefarious lifestyle, there's supposed to be an essentially noble spirit inside of the debased Cranston, so a Tibetan Buddhist priest forces him to take on the mantle of his own dark side in the pursuit of justice. He also teaches Cranston all sorts of nifty tricks, like mass hypnosis and mental telepathy.

Unfortunately, this priest teaches the same things to Shiwan Khan (John Lone), the last descendant of Genghis. Since Shiwan is a chip off the old barbarian block, he naturally wants to use his powers to con­quer the world. He intends to do this by blowing up New York City with a Chinese variation of the atomic bomb.

Lone may play a heinous baddie, but at least his character is colorful. As the Shad­ow, Baldwin is dreadful, except when he poses in the costume. Penelope Ann Miller, as the Shadow s love interest, is equally bad, giving a performance that weaves between spaciness and bad comedy. Only Jonathan Winters — as Cranston's uncle, the bum­bling police commissioner who can't figure out the identity of the shadowy figure who's spooking the city — breathes any life into this movie.

So if you really want to frolic in the wild exploits of The Shadow this summer, your best bet is to locate recordings of the radio show. They're exciting.