`ONE NIGHT STAND' SNEAKS AROUND.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

``One Night Stand,'' Mike Figgis' follow-up to his devastating dirge of a movie ``Leaving Las Vegas,'' is more like a lite jazz jam. Some great notes are struck - especially by actors Wesley Snipes, Ming-Na Wen and Robert Downey Jr. - but they all blur into amorphous, instantly forgotten atmospherics.

It's the cinematic equivalent of a Kenny G. noodling, and it has about as much to say on its chosen topics, infidelity and midlife dissatisfaction.

Snipes plays successful but conflicted commercial director Max Carlyle. Stuck overnight in New York when he can't make a flight home to L.A., the more-or-less happily married Max dawdles with a pliable blond beauty, Nastassja Kinski's Karen, who also claims to be very married.

Max feels guilty, guilty, guilty the next day when his energetic wife Mimi (Wen) picks him up at LAX in her hot pink Suburban. They've got two great kids and a house in the hills and, yeah, she's pretty bossy in bed, but overall Max has a lot to lose on the domestic front.

Professionally, it's a little different. Max works for the hottest ad agency in the universe, but his affair has caused him to question the true value of his work (like, he ever thought there was any?). Max takes to smoking too much dope and acting mildly confrontational at social gatherings, which leads to an argument in which Mimi complains, ``Everybody was having a good time until you had to make it serious.''

Not exactly life-shattering, any of this, though Figgis tries to pump the incidents with soul-searching significance. But perhaps what's really eating Max is his estranged, former best friend Charlie (Downey), who's dying in New York from AIDS complications.

Then again, nah. A year after that significant night, Max and Mimi fly to Manhattan to be at Charlie's bedside, where they meet Charlie's straitlaced brother Vernon (Kyle MacLachlan) and his wife - surprise! - Karen. Suddenly, Max is all bothered again, and not just because he's afraid the cuckolded spouses will find out.

You know the movie's gone around the bend when it's announced, over sushi, that Karen is a rocket scientist - like this explains her un-Mimilike inability to make engaging small talk. Anyway, as Charlie fades and takes Downey's vivid, if overobvious ``grab-that-life'' wisdom along with him, things get obsessive in a most uninvolving way.

Figgis wants to be kind and nonjudgmental toward everyone in this coincidental quadrangle, which is admirable but not real conducive to gripping melodrama - at least when there's not an underscore of great character insight at work.

The musical metaphors are apt because Figgis views film like a composer (as he does with most of his movies, he wrote ``Stand's'' Gypsy-inflected jazz score). ``Vegas' '' cinematographer Declan Quinn provides appropriately lyrical camera work and moody light schemes.

But as personalized as he's inevitably made the picture, Figgis can't quite overcome the fact that it's based on a self-justifying, superficial Joe Eszterhas concept. Figgis utterly re-imagined Eszterhas' original short treatment - the ``Showgirls'' writer happily gave up all creative claim to the finished product, well after cashing a large check - but the film still plays shallow at all the emotional points where ``Leaving Las Vegas'' dove dangerously deep.

THE FACTS

The film: ``One Night Stand'' (R; sex, language, nudity, drug use, mild violence).

The stars: Wesley Snipes, Nastassja Kinski, Ming-Na Wen, Kyle MacLachlan, Robert Downey Jr.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Mike Figgis, based on a concept by Joe Eszterhas. Produced by Figgis, Annie Stewart and Ben Myron. Released by New Line Cinema.

Running time: One hour, 43 minutes

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Two and One Half Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Natassja Kinski and Wesley Snipes are married to different people but attracted to one another in ``One Night Stand.''