Robert De Niro and Sean Penn go through the entire movie with the facial expressions of having a very bad smell in their nostrils. This must be their notion of comic acting. It can't be that they've got a premonitory whiff of the finished product. For one thing, De Niro himself is the executive producer of it: he must have some faith in it. For another thing, it's not really all that rotten. Just a little feeble. Written by David Mamet in what may have been viewed by him as a period of relaxation (same as his script for The Untouchables), it's about two escaped convicts making their way to the Canadian border when they're mistaken for two auctorial priests, and are dragooned into the annual festival at the Shrine of the Weeping Virgin, 1935. We keep waiting for the two real priests to turn up; they never show. Most other expected developments, however, soon trail along: having to say grace, having to take confession, etc. The twosome's interminable pauses at such moments, their Dead End Kid dialects, their actual words (once they come), although plausible enough in the circumstances, produce more discomfort in the viewer than mirth. And they are not plausible enough in their triumphant effect. (Far and away the movie's funniest inspiration is the hero-worshipping young novice, who takes all the imposters' fiddle-faddle as gospel.) Then, too, the atmosphere is not quite right for a comedy. Neil Jordan (Company of Wolves, Mona Lisa), who styles himself as an enchanter beyond a mere director, has created some truly fairy-tale effects: the hellish prison, the dawn-of-creation winter landscape, the entire rambling woody bordertown, not to mention the literally miraculous climax in the waterfalls. This is all gorgeous stuff, but it's a bit thick and heavy for the kind of comedy that's perched at the other end of the teeter-totter, frantically kicking its feet. With Demi Moore. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd