DE NIRO-MURPHY COMEDY COPS GENERIC ATTITUDE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

NEITHER the funniest film that Eddie Murphy nor Robert De Niro has ever made, ``Showtime'' is nevertheless efficiently amusing for a good while. Before it collapses into exactly the kind of buddy cop comedy it set out to lampoon, anyway.

More specifically, the satirical target here is reality television of the ``Cops'' variety, the kind of productions that stage-manage documentary footage for maximum dramatic impact - or, that being unfeasible, for maximum embarrassment.

Yes, I know: easy, overnailed subject; yawn. But a totally professional Murphy and De Niro, along with Rene Russo as an unstoppable producer and William Shatner in his umpteenth expert send-up of himself, work the sometimes clever, sometimes tired material for everything it's worth. At the very least, those who gagged at ``15 Minutes,'' a dumber if more serious-minded cop/media satire that De Niro appeared in a year ago, will notice quite an improvement.

In the script by Orange County Register reporter Keith Sharon and the team of Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who created the TV series ``Smallville'' and wrote director Tom Dey's ``Shanghai Noon,'' De Niro plays by-the-book LAPD detective Mitch Preston, and Murphy is incompetent patrolman Trey Sellars. Trey is just making a buck in uniform before his actual goal, being discovered for his questionable acting talent, is realized. Mitch is still recovering from a while-ago divorce; all he has in life is the job he does well and the pottery-making hobby he doesn't.

When Trey blows one of Mitch's undercover operations, the detective takes out his anger on an intrusive TV news cameraman. Since the guy worked for a fifth-rate network where career-desperate, cheerfully manipulative and slightly-turned-on-by-Mitch Chase Renzi (Russo) works, she convinces the execs to, rather than sue the department, make it force Mitch to let their cameras follow him around for a new, life-on-the-street series called, uh-huh, ``Showtime.''

When word gets out around Parker Center that the program desires to saddle Mitch with an ethnic sidekick, Trey goes all-out to win the part, to the point of staging a fake snatching of Chase's purse with an acting-class crony. Taciturn Mitch, of course, would prefer matches under his fingernails to working with this showboating idiot. But Chase is duly impressed, and soon the two mismatched law enforcers are forced into bonding while tracking down the distributors of a deadly new armor-piercing gun that could turn the streets of L.A. into a war zone worse than Afghanistan. And with cameras recording their every move, which is fine with Trey, intolerable to Mitch and a real hazard to the investigation.

Playing it even straighter than he did in ``Analyze This'' and ``Meet the Parents,'' De Niro subtly whips up a good head of love/hate chemistry with Murphy and Russo. Murphy has a moment or two - he's particularly impressive in a show-within-the-investigation sequence, when he interrogates a jailed accomplice by pretending to be the host of a new prison reality TV series. But it's getting harder and harder for the movies' most successful comic actor to dazzle us in such fundamentally pedestrian material when his talents have really evolved to a point where only outstanding challenges, like ``Bowfinger'' and the ``Nutty Professor'' movies, can really inspire him.

As for director Dey, he applies the same easygoing jollity to this material as he did to the Jackie Chan western, which isn't exactly the shrewdest tone for a scathing media satire. Ideas of jokes here can get as bad as a cameo of Johnnie Cochran playing himself. But then, it must be said that any movie that thinks of having a ham like Shatner say of De Niro, ``This guy is the worst actor that I've ever seen,'' has some real sense of how values have been hopelessly skewed by our television-saturated culture.

Dey also stages a destructive car chase interestingly enough, which is no small feat at this stage in the genre. But the climax at a gun show misses its joke potential by a mile and ends up, virtually, all wet.

SHOWTIME - Three stars

(Rated PG-13: violence, language)

Starring: Robert De Niro, Eddie Murphy, Rene Russo, William Shatner.

Director: Tom Dey.

Running time: 1 hr. 35 min.

Playing: Wide release.