WHEN YOU SEE AN ALIEN, WHO YA GONNA CALL?

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

Amiability in a big-budget, special-effects gross-out comedy may not be the greatest thing. But it's the best thing ``Evolution'' has going for it, and considering the alternatives in this summer of crashingly crass blockbuster movies, it's kind of a pleasant relief.

Borrowing liberally from both ``Men in Black'' and his own ``Ghostbusters'' movies, director Ivan Reitman adopts a kind of po'-faced, workaday stance toward the destruction of mankind by outlandish, interplanetary means. Rather than the hyper-goofy intensity of the Ghostbusters or the ironic smugness of the MiB, the heroes of ``Evolution'' are basically your average semi-losers whose nowhere lives could only benefit from a little world-threatening action.

Of course, cinema having developed the way it has over the last couple of years, said action forces them into much-too-close encounters with malodorous sections of alien anatomy. But rather than the mean-spirited, gag-reflex humor we've been subjected to in most recent movies, this, at least, is all done in the morally neutral name of science.

David Duchovny and Orlando Jones are Dr. Ira Kane and Harry Block, professors at a woebegone community college in remote Glen Canyon, Ariz. When a meteor crashes in the nearby desert and starts oozing goo full of outer-space DNA, the two scientists dream that their discovery will win them Nobel prizes. When they learn that the stuff evolves into higher life forms at a rate millions of times faster than Earth's biosphere did, the trip to Stockholm seems a virtual lock.

But then things start happening. The military gets wind of the situation and seals off the cave where the meteor is rapidly growing its own environment. And the ever-more-complex creatures that generate - first flatworms, then toothsome amphibians, giant flying dino-things and murderously Kubrickian albino primates - find ways, as life will, to slip out and into the unsuspecting community.

Ira and Harry's research soon turns into a jocular but deadly serious effort to prevent the mutating aliens from overwhelming our world. With the army pigheadedly set on precisely the wrong plan of action, our guys must ally with the only people willing to help them: Allison, a smart and sexy but stumblebum government scientist (Julianne Moore, good when she's not trying to be funny) and Wayne, a clueless country club pool boy with dreams of becoming a fireman (``Dude, Where's My Car's'' Seann William Scott in - yikes - the most intelligent performance of his career).

Duchovny takes a wry-and-dry approach to the proceedings; it's like all the jadedness about crazy alien high jinks he built up over eight years on ``The X-Files'' has been tempered through the blessed relief that this may be the last time he has to deal with the subject. There's a loose, easygoing comic rapport between him and funnyman Jones, who is appropriately energetic in extreme moments but otherwise keeps the performance nicely under control.

The evolving creatures, designed by ``Jurassic Park'' Oscar winner Phil Tippett, are mostly visualized as imaginative variations on the species of Earth's own distant past. While many comic - and a few scientific - possibilities are left frustratingly unexplored by the movie, one of ``Evolution's'' unalloyed pleasures lies in seeing just what this unholy marriage of natural selection and Hollywood fakery will come up with next.

``EVOLUTION''

(Rated PG-13: violence, language, nudity)

The stars: David Duchovny, Julianne Moore, Orlando Jones, Seann William Scott.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Ivan Reitman. Written by Don Jakoby, David Diamond and David Weissman. Produced by Reitman, Daniel Goldberg and Joe Medjuck. Released by DreamWorks.

Running time: One hour, 43 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Three stars

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David Duchovny, left, Julianne Moore and Orlando Jones face an alien onslaught in the sci-fi comedy ``Evolution.''