TO CATCH A THIEF -- 'Small Time Crooks' & 'Mission: Impossible 2'.

Something has happened to Woody Allen's face. Allen was never a pretty picture, but his famous nebbish looks and wimpish physique did convey a certain elfish charm, a Groucho Marx-like lasciviousness, and a nervous little-guy's determination to succeed. In Small Time Crooks, Allen needs at least some measure of these contradictory qualities, but his face fails him. There's too much basset hound and not enough imp in it now. He is probably too old to bring off the role of Ray Winkler, a comically inept ex-convict and aspiring bank robber, whose very incompetence saves him from one calamity after another. Whatever the reason, even more than usual Allen seems merely to be pretending, merely standing in as the hapless Ray. He's just a mouthpiece for the clever jokes and nicely turned dialogue. Allen is oddly lifeless even when the oneliners are as sharp as the lines in his face.

Small Time Crooks is a return to the verbal high jinks and slapstick comedy of Allen's early years. Fans will be reminded of Bananas, Take the Money and Run, Play It Again, Sam, and other inspired moments in higher lunacy, where the director/writer/star packed a hundred perfectly turned jokes into ninety minutes of unpretentious plotting. Also true to form, Allen has found an ideal female counterpart in Tracey Ullman, the versatile comic actress who plays Ray's wisecracking wife, Frenchy. Ray and Frenchy have what might politely be called a bantering relationship, with Frenchy's hilarious and devastating putdowns reducing her benighted spouse to sputtering indignation. It is no surprise that Ullman, vaguely reminiscent of Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose, fully inhabits her part as a tough-talking working-class New Yorker who can't believe what her moronic husband and his even more dimwitted buddies are up to. Ullman's Frenchy is a small triumph as well as a small-time crook.

Much of the humor of Small Time Crooks relies on the sheer stupidity of its characters. Writing stupid characters who are also funny is not easy, but neither are those characters likely to hold our interest for very long. They don't even hold Allen's interest, as he quickly dispenses with the crew of bumbling numbskulls surrounding Ray, and brings on a smarmy Hugh Grant to romance and betray Frenchy, who aspires to the better things in life once the couple can afford them. Ray's idiot friends (including the wonderfully wan Jon Lovitz) are sorely missed when the action moves upscale and uptown.

Allen's abandonment of the film's Three Stooges-like subplot does allow him to give more screen time to Elaine May, who plays a character (named May) so ditzy that she makes Yogi Berra and Casey Stengel sound like geniuses. Whether May is revealing Ray's bank-robbing scheme to the police or charming a prospective suitor with a near-lunatic weather report, she walks through the picture with the blissed-out expression of Michael Dukakis behind the wheel of an army tank.

Too much of Small Time Crooks is taken up with the trauma of Ray's and Frenchy's efforts, once they have money, to make it into the Social Register. This drama of social climbing and nouveaux riches seems almost antique, a slightly updated version of Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. Grant, however, is no William Holden and Allen no Broderick Crawford. That the rich are crass and deceitful is hardly news. That they are not as soulful as the film's wayward heroes is trite sloganeering, as are the film's platitudes about how money can't make us happy. The whole class dynamic, from Frenchy's naked social ambitions to Ray's stolid allegiances to the simpler pleasures, is a page out of Hollywood's version of the Depression. Do working-class Americans really want to emulate the cultural pretensions and social manners of the rich? In an era when popular culture threatens to sweep away all such distinctions, the situation seems reversed, with the wealthy desperate to appear hip, if not hip-hop.

Speaking of popular culture, what more is there to say about Tom Cruise and Mission: Impossible 2, this summer's biggest hit? Much has been written about Cruise's mercurial coiffure and the film's stunningly beautiful damsel-in-distress/jewel thief, Thandie Newton. Cruise, who also produced this formulaic James Bond-like thriller, hasn't lost any of his boyish charm or any megawattage from his multimillion-dollar smile. As Ethan Hunt, the dextrous leader of a team of secret agents battling the forces of evil on an inexhaustible expense account, Cruise is still rappelling down skyscrapers and aping Cyrano de Bergerac, thanks to Mission: Impossible's patented peel-off latex masks. In this installment of the series the latex masks are used more promiscuously than ever, and the directing duties have been handed over to John Woo, who made a name for himself with violent but balletic action movies in Hong Kong. Woo's influence is evident in Ethan Hunt's mastery of the martial arts, the film's slow-motion fight scenes, and the fiery demolitions of countless automobiles, many of them (happily) shiny new sport utility vehicles. There are also some nifty motorcycle stunts that children should not attempt at home. Woo, considered a virtuoso by some, keeps the carnage piling up, the camera moving in vertiginous arcs and sweeps, and the hero and heroine tantalizingly apart. In other words, he knows when to muss up Cruise's hair and when to part it neatly.

This genre depends on the manifest villainy of its bad guys. In this regard, Mission: Impossible 2 has some luck with Dougray Scott, who plays the sinister Sean Ambrose, a former colleague of Hunt's who has gone over to the dark side. Ambrose is ruthless in the way great cartoon meanies are ruthless, right down to his gruesome habit of paring other people's fingernails a knuckle or two short with a handy device he otherwise uses for snipping off the ends of cigars. Betraying not an ounce of human decency, he plans to kill thousands by releasing a lethal virus for which only he has the antidote. A sure moneymaker, he figures. But Ambrose also has a more human, if not a gentler side. He is the former lover of Ethan Hunt's new paramour Nyah Hall, the aforementioned jewel thief. True to his higher mission, Hunt must use Hall, featured throughout in a series of fetching outfits, to bait his trap. Nothing personal, you understand, just business. Ambrose furrows his brow terrifically upon learning that his former mistress has teamed up with his archrival. Like all the villains in the Mission: Impossible movies, he doesn't seem to understand how hard it is to say no to Tom Cruise.

Most of Mission: Impossible 2 is set in Australia, although it could easily have been California, the coast of Maine, or a back lot in Burbank. There is a brief sequence that takes place in Seville, replete with thundering flamenco dancers, pyrotechnical religious processions, and Moorish arches. Seville seems the more intriguing location, and one wishes the Mission Impossible "team" had spent more time ducking in and out of dark alleyways in that venerable city. But that wish may be simply the result of so much rhythmic foot stomping and too many aerial shots of Sydney's famed Opera House.

It is tempting to think of movies like Mission: Impossible 2 as a version of the potlatch. Tens of millions of dollars are burned up for the moviegoing public's vicarious pleasure and psychological catharsis. In the potlatch, of course, the extravagant sacrifice was an enactment of social solidarity. In the movies, similar extravagance only fuels childish fantasies of omnipotence and Manichaean notions of how evil exists in the world. Still, Cruise and Woo are to be complimented for their wanton destruction of that sacred suburban icon, the sport utility vehicle. Sometimes violence is a good thing.

Paul Baumann is Commonweal's executive editor.