Crash.

JAMES Ballard and his wife, Catherine, are turned on by car crashes, and the wounds and deaths they lead to. If these do not by themselves induce orgasm, there is huggermugger sex in the front or back seat to get the job done. Alternatively, one can have intercourse anywhere, even in bed, so long as one fantasizes about automotive mayhem or its participants. This is the premise of David Cronenberg's Crash, fairly (but not altogether) faithfully based on J. G. Ballard's novel, and a piece of failed pornography.

Pornography, in my view, is a work existing for the sole purpose of sexual arousal, without any regard for truth or existential relevance. I am not against it, so long as it is kept out of the hands of children. But of all pornography, Crash is least likely to be catching: few people would risk car crashes for sexual thrills; even fewer could afford it.

As the movie begins, Catherine enjoys sex with a stranger on top of an air-plane engine, and James likes to snatch a quickie where the risk of discovery is greatest. (The even worse novel dispenses with such feeble attempts at etiology.) One day, James crashes into an oncoming car, whose driver is spectacularly killed; the victim's passenger and wife, Dr. Helen Remington, is so aroused that she instantly bares her breast at the wounded James. We cut to the hospital, where, by James's bedside, Catherine, too, is oddly affected, as is a stranger, Vaughan, who comes around photographing Ballard's wounds. Thus is born a folie a deux, trois, or quatre, depending on your mode of counting.

Vaughan is the Canadian director's most egregious error. In the novel, he is a grubby, pockmarked weirdo who re-stages celebrity car crashes for audiences of like-mindless fanatics. In the film, he is played by Elias Koteas, an actor yet more repellent, so that no one -- in his wrong mind even -- would want to get involved with him, psychically or sexually, as James and Catherine do. Still, the only vaguely titillating scene has the couple in bed fantasizing intercourse with Vaughan - Koteas, which strikes me as sicker than humping a hood ornament. But Deborah Kara Unger, who plays Catherine, has a quality of ecstatic sensual absorption the other actresses cannot manage.

Holly Hunter wasn't Cronenberg's first choice for Helen, but shouldn't even have been his last. She earnestly says and does the perverse or merely sexual things demanded of her, as if reciting the Girl Scout manual or working out in an aerobics class. The equally unsexy Rosanna Arquette plays Gabrielle, a scarred waif who clanks about in a body suit and braces whose metallic content might be the envy of C3P0. Her copulations with James and, later, Helen in a car are even logistically preposterous: it's like trying to fit an ironing board into a microwave oven and then having sex with it. Crash is less lewd than ludicrous.

The film is most risible when Vaughan - Koteas goes metaphysical: "For the first time, the car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event: a liberation of sexual energy that mediates the sexuality of those who died with an intensity impossible in any other form." Ballard wrote the novel in 1973, when Barthes and Foucault were still going strong, and such drivel was taken seriously; today, and on film, it is as if someone had crossbred the outtakes of Eric Rohmer and Peter Greenaway -- in a car, of course. And when ever more fantastic games of murderous bumper cars are played with what seems to be the entire rush-hour traffic of Toronto, you lose all respect even for the Toronto highway police.

Peter Suschitzky shoots it all in gelid, steel blue and iron grey tones, for clinical detachment as well as to highlight naked flesh and copious gore. Miss Unger is good only in the sexual scenes, but as James, James Spader is, I'm afraid, perfect for all of it. No other actor so oozes spineless, slack-jawed kinkiness even when it is not called for. Otherwise, the film is about as compelling as the endless interviews in which the director-scenarist has been explicating its profundities: a crashing bore.

Alan J. Pakula is a careful and accomplished craftsman whose films are made with every attribute befitting the master, short of the je ne sais quoi that would elevate them into art. This, needless to say, does not keep him from being one of Hollywood's better directors, though not, alas, with his latest effort.

The Devil's Own has come in for its share of advance publicity thanks to abundant rumors: its co-stars, Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt, not getting along; the script not ready when shooting began, and continually rewritten thereafter. Further, Pitt was loudly badmouthing the movie, though he later recanted. Gossip helps, but perhaps not enough to guarantee success. The three credited screenwriters -- Kevin Jarre, David Aaron Cohen, Vincent Patrick --have wildly divergent uvres, though the names that end up in the credits may have little to do with the film.

This scenario, in any case, is a hybrid right off. We start with a quiet family dinner in Northern Ireland. Then eight-year-old Frankie McGuire's da is brutally murdered at the dinner table, turning the traumatized boy into the devil's own. We gather that the killers were of the Protestant persuasion, for we next meet Frankie as a young streetfighter, the scourge of the British in Belfast.

In this street-fighting, the Brits, who set a trap for Frankie and his pals, are presented as no less Satan's own -- as when their chief kills a wounded IRA sniper coldly at close range. This may be deemed excusable in civil warfare, but the chief is played by Simon Jones, an actor whose sneers are magisterial, and may hurt more than bullets. These action sequences are well made, but cannot escape the sense of deja vu, especially when there is no suspense: Frankie, i.e., Brad Pitt, cannot die this early on.

We skip ahead again: Frankie, now called Rory Devaney, arrives in New York to buy Stinger missiles. An Irish-American judge and IRA sympathizer, on the premise that in plain sight is the best place to hide, lodges Rory with a policeman on Staten Island: the fatherly Sgt. Tom O'Meara (Harrison Ford), married to warm-hearted Sheila (Margaret Colin), with a brood of daughters thrilled to have Brad Pitt in their midst. Rory gets a blue-collar job and slowly goes about acquiring those missiles. I have no idea how one buys such fancy weaponry, and neither, I suspect, have the screenwriters. It all goes through a diabolical businessman, Billy Burke (Treat Williams, in an obvious performance), and is very fuzzy storytelling.

More important is the growing affection between fatherless Rory and sonless Tom, against the cozy O'Meara background. Rory also makes contact with an old IRA chum and Megan, the sister of a slain other one. The story dawdles along at a pace so leisurely that you think Rory will forget all about the Troubles and his mission, marry Megan, and continue as Tom's surrogate son in the house next door. For well over an hour this Staten Island idyll threatens to become The Making of an American.

There is also Tom's police work, full of radiant cliches about good-cop activities. My favorite is when an escaping dreadlocked young black, whom other officers are ready to shoot, is humanely caught by Tom. It turns out the youth was running because he was too bashful to present himself to the cashier with some condoms. For such delicate sensibility, the paternal cop promptly lets him go, although we do not actually see Tom paying for the boy's rubbers.

After long hibernation, the story resumes, and works up to the typical ending, where noble outlaw and nobler cop fight it out to the death (guess whose), presented as supreme male bonding. Brad Pitt manages a good Belfast accent; not enough, however, to wag an entire performance. Harrison Ford exudes evenhandedly manly warmth and manly pain. The best work comes from Margaret Colin and Natascha McElhone (Megan), as well as Gordon Willis's camera; the rest is the devil's own.