Late Boomer

BRINGING OUT THE DEAD (1999) (B) - Martin Scorsese has spent the past two decades making above-average movies or creating really good scenes in average movies. He had his time, and it's long past.

This Nicolas Cage fever dream certainly has zip and color, but it suffers from the director's late-era excesses -- kinetic camerawork and loud classic overplayed pop songs. (10,000 Maniacs, anyone?) It's an '80s aesthetic that he never evolved from.

This Paul Schrader adaptation of Joe Connelly's novel is certainly entertaining, and it has a strong narrative arc that is compelling. It's just too full of shtick to not feel dated.

Cage is Frank Pierce, a graveyard-shift NYC EMT who is beyond burned out and is haunted by the lives he could not save. Over the course of the film he pairs with three partners, one crazier than the other. John Goodman is rather subdued as desensitized Larry; Ving Rhames slings spirituality as Marcus; and finally, Tom Sizemore is off his rocker (and, apparently, his meds) as wild Tom Wolls, the spark this movie desperately needs in its final act.

The weak link here is Patricia Arquette as sad Mary Burke, who's father has a heart attack in the opening scene and survives on life support for a couple of days after Frank's initial rescue. Arquette's whispery affect and flat tone betray her weaknesses as an actress. (Schrader's hard-boiled Big Apple patois doesn't help her, as she has to spit out trite lines like this: "This city -- it'll kill ya if you're not strong enough.") Even in her better roles, like last year's "Boyhood," her awkward delivery can take a viewer out of the narrative.

Meantime, Scorsese shoots scenes like a meth addict playing paintball. The wee hours in grim Hell's Kitchen are often dimly lit but rendered in bursts of primary colors. He pens a valentine to the city in the form of a drug dealer impaled on a 15th-floor balcony spike and deliriously exhorting his love of life while a welder's sparks create a symphony of fireworks splashing across the midnight skyline.

Cage is in that just-right zone of maniacal without going over the top. Like his turn in "Moonstruck" he manages to exude melancholy and rage, ratcheting up the stakes to the end. Thankfully, Frank's relationship with Mary -- they slowly bond as she monitors her father's condition -- is rendered in a mature and shaded manner.

But Scorsese can't help turning the pathos up to 11. Frank is devastated by one dead person in particular, a young woman named Rose (Cynthia Roman) whose face is superimposed on nearly every body he glimpses from his ambulance. That ham-handed story line keeps this from joining the pantheon of great films that Scorsese made before 1991.