A LOT OF TALENT SQUANDERED IN UNINVOLVING `CELEBRITY'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

Woody Allen aims at a big, obvious target - America's obsession with fame - and mostly makes broad, obvious hits in his latest grouchy comedy, ``Celebrity.''

Shot in black-and-white (by Sven Nykvist, no less) and episodic even for an Allen film, it's both tepid and mean-spirited. That makes it kind of a pale mirror image to Allen's last feature, the laceratingly angry, bold and exhilaratingly complicated ``Deconstructing Harry.''

Well, not an exact, if drabbed down, reflection. Allen stays behind the camera for this one, and recruited the younger Kenneth Branagh to be his neurotic, womanizing stand-in. While this is something of a mercy, considering that the character romances the tender likes of Winona Ryder, Charlize Theron and even Melanie Griffith, there's nothing merciful about watching the self-regarding Shakespearean sputter his way through an Allen impersonation that's all twitch and stammer.

Yes, Woody is too old for the young leading ladies he favors. But he's nonetheless the only one who can do a tolerable Woodman.

Branagh's Lee Simon is a Manhattan entertainment journalist who gets a ruinous case of midlife cris-itis when a flighty movie star (Griffith) bestows a quickie during an interview lull.

In no time, he's left his schoolteacher wife, Robin (Allen favorite Judy Davis), taken up with a publishing professional (Famke Janssen) who's both too good for him and for him to appreciate, and in hot pursuit of the twin chimeras of dangerous beauties (Theron's easily distracted supermodel, Ryder's teasingly noncommittal bohemian) and selling a screenplay.

The film's funniest 10 minutes - and an object lesson in why the hottest actors on the planet drop everything to work with Allen for scale - involve Lee's extended pitch meeting with a misbehaving movie star played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Uproariously lampooning every dark speculation that's been made about his ``King of the World'' lifestyle, Leo abuses a girlfriend, trashes hotel rooms, maintains an entourage, gambles away fortunes and conducts orgies, all the while making narcissistic story suggestions to the desperate Lee.

It's great stuff, and there are spatterings of similar satiric brilliance elsewhere in the film. But the overall picture is lazier. Allen leans heavily on cheap sex jokes and the less-than-urgent notion that our media-drenched society devalues real humanity.

To be fair, there is a bit more complexity in Robin's case. Devastated by Lee's abandonment, she dithers her way into a relationship with a pretty nice and enormously patient tabloid TV producer (Joe Mantegna). But while their affair may bring Robin long-delayed personal fulfillment, it also leads to a broadcast job, which turns her into one of those on-air personalities whose superficiality is matched only by their cluelessness.

You'd think Davis, who was so ferocious, vulnerable and hilarious for Allen in ``Husbands and Wives'' and ``Deconstructing Harry,'' could turn Robin into another real force of insecure, guilt-choked nature. But her performance is surprisingly uninvolving - not because she doesn't try, but because Allen has her waste too much time on lame routines about plastic surgery and fruit-based sex technique instruction.

Needless to say, there's a sour quality to ``Celebrity's'' humor. That's nothing new for Allen; he was first roundly criticized for it in the 1980 ``Stardust Memories,'' another media satire that, in retrospect, leavened its misanthropy with smarter, more daring comic invention than what's displayed here.

Ironically, ``Stardust'' was the film in which fans of Allen's autobiographical character told him they preferred his ``earlier, funny ones.'' Compared to ``Celebrity,'' that movie was one of them.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Celebrity'' (R; language, sex, drug use, mild violence).

The stars: Kenneth Branagh, Judy Davis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Melanie Griffith, Famke Janssen, Joe Mantegna, Winona Ryder, Charlize Theron.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Woody Allen. Produced by Jean Doumanian. Released by Miramax Films.

Running time: One hour, 50 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Two and one half stars.

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Photo

Photo: Kenneth Branagh and Winona Ryder in ``Celebrity.''