Daily News from New York, New York • 39

A 3 7X3 Friday, May 18, 1990 DAILY NEWS 39 ii Jl i Jim mm EXTRA MOVIES can amis' '(galilac Cute7 jimsG fasaEss i audience in confidential asides like Tom Jones or AI-fie. He has a lot of problems, most of them centering around women. He likes women, he has trouble resisting them, and he spends a lot of money on them. That means he's usually broke, and if he doesn't sell a dozen cars at the dealership's big moving sale this CADILLAC MAN. Robin Williams, Tim Rob-bins.

Pamela Reed. Directed by Roger Donaldson. At Loews Paramount, Tower East, 34th St. and 19th Running time: 95 mins. Rated R.

DT ALL COMES DOWN TO which kind of movie you'd really rather see. Given the choice, would you prefer a movie about a hotshot car salesman so 4 Sunday, he may lose his job. We meet some of the women in his life, especially his mistress (Fran Drescher) and his ex-wife (Pamela Reed), and we also get a look at the sexpot (Anna-bella Sciorra) who works in the dealership's front office. Everybody shameless he'd try to sell a car to a widow at her husband's funeral? Or would you rather see a movie about how the salesman tries to talk a suicidal husband out of killing himself and everybody else in the dealership? If "Cadillac life on the distraught husband. Williams and Robbins (who played the young pitcher in "Bull are convincing in this long sequence, which is built by director Roger Donaldson and writer Ken Friedman into a series of peaks and valleys, complicated by the arrival of the husband of Williams' mistress.

But somehow I kept waiting for the movie to get back on track to get back to the zany comedy I thought I'd been promised. My problems with "Cadillac Man" were probably inspired more by false expectations than by anything on the screen, and maybe if Robbins had come crashing in through the window in the first scene, I would have liked it more. One footnote: Two scenes in the movie feature Lauren Tom as the waitress at the nearby Chinese restaurant You've met waitresses like this before: small women who take a delight in talking back to their clients and banging them on the head with the menu when they order the wrong thing. Miss Tom steals both scenes with a performance that's funnier than anything else in the movie. Sometimes TV sitcoms are spun out of characters like hers, and I'd love to see them try one this time.

ROGER EBERT on the sales force feels libidinous about her, except for the supersaleswo-man Lila (Lori Petty), who leads the staff in sales, perhaps because she has one less distraction. Up until this point, the movie seems to be a setup for a big sales contest in which lies will be told and dirty tricks pulled. But then an angry husband (Tim Robbins) comes crashing in through the plate glass window on his motorcycle, waving Man" had been the second movie from beginning to end, I have a feeling I might have enjoyed it more. But it started as the first movie and then turned into the second, leaving me frustrated and a little disoriented: What happened to all the setups in the first hour? Were they going to be left hanging? The movie stars Robin Williams as Joey O'Brien, the car salesman, who addresses the STATIC: Robin Williams tries to talk Tim Robbins out of using the gun. a machine gun and threatening between Williams and Rob-to kill everyone.

The movie be- bins, as the salesman tries to comes an extended dialogue do the best selling job of his Mel, Goldie can't make 'Bird on a Wire' fly mal amount of electricity in what is little more than a fly-by-night action movie. One has the impression that there was simply no script until the two stars actually showed up on location. There's something desperate about the way director John Badham piles on the action lurching from the inevitable car chases to BIRD ON A WIRE. Mel Gibson, Goldie Hawn. Directed by John Badham.

At area theaters. Running time: 113 mins. Rated PG-13. rpiIEY SOUND LIKE A I casting agent's dream team. First at bat is Mel Gibson, whose good looks and devilish grin have transformed him into a I j.W ff Hollywood sex symbol.

Next up is another heavy Hollywood hitter Goldie Hawn, whose girlish gig-gles once endeared her to an entire nation. Put the perpetually perky comic actress with Gibson in "Bird On a Wire" and you would expect this such admittedly entertaining high-risk stunts as a daredevil confrontation between a small plane and a lethal-looking helicopter. The basic situation is this: Rick Jarmin (Gibson) is hiding out under the Federal Witness Protection KATHLEEN CARROLL i a1-" AIRBORNE: Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn on the lam and in the air in "Bird on a Wire. powerhouse combination to score big at the box office. Right? Maybe not.

The fact is, Gibson's movies tend to flop unless his leading ladies are killed off. His fans do not appear all that eager to see him walk off into the proverbial sunset with a permanent squeeze. In other words, he works better solo, which may explain his desire to do "Hamlet," which he currently is filming. AH this is by way of saying that Gibson and Hawn are not the perfect screen love Program because his testimony put two ruthless thugs behind bars. The thugs, as you would expect, have been sprung from jail and they are already closing in on Jarmin, who's working as a mechanic in a Detroit garage.

Who should pull up to this very garage but Jarmin's old girlfriend, Marianne Graves (Hawn), a presumably cool-headed corporate lawyer. Marianne loses her cool on the spot as she recognizes Rick despite hisXfeeble ef- and the thugs on their trail, she and Rick squabble while facing every peril in the book, including a final close encounter with both their beastly pursuers and some jungle beasts in a zoo's simulated rain forest But all the frenzied activity such cliche action shots as a motorcycle charging through the laundry lines in a Chinatown alley fails to really engage the audience. Hawn gets a few laughs as the pampered woman The thugs turn up with guns blazing. Rick winds up with a bullet in his buttocks, which leads to obvious jokes. Hawn immediately reverts to the kind of coy antics that made her a star in the first place, playing the high-powered New York lawyer as if she were a shrill teenybop-per.

Of course, by this time Marianne has every right to act hysterical as she joins Rick on the lam, only to find herself one- of law enforce-. a manicure. But for all of Gibson's boyish charm, Rick, whose trouble began when he blew his chance to become a marijuana dealer (the fact that it was not cocaine is apparently supposed to make him seem more palatable), is no prize catch. True reckless types like Rick can be exciting to have around. Even so you never quite believe that this good-natured runaway guy is the one who, so to speak, relights Marianne's.

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