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Analyze This movie review

What would you do if you were an under-achiever psychiatrist and a mob boss suffering from panic attacks turns up at your office?

This, of course, was one of the interesting sub-plots in Grosse Pointe Blank, here it is the subject of the film. Billy Crystal plays the psychiatrist and Robert De Niro the mob boss.

According to producer Jane Rosenthal, "Bob (de Niro) was concerned about whether or not he would be parodying himself in this material. After all, he could wind up mocking the closest thing Robert De Niro has to a franchise character."

But decided De Niro, "I was also thinking that the time had come for me to poke a little fun at myself."

" So my first step was to sit down with Billy and Bob and discuss the approach. I also told them that the thing I wanted to say in this film was that, in order to break the cycle of violence, you have to deal with these issues (fear, grief, rage and built) in young men. Generally, gangs are formed because unexpressed feelings of guilt and rage fester, and I wanted to show a young audience that as our character, Paul Vitti, learns to deal with his repressed and sometimes frightening feelings, he's able to break the cycle of violence. It's possible. Yes, the film is a comedy and we were never going to lose sight of that. But a comedy can still say something meaningful."

With so much thought and such professionals, it's impossible to imagine Analyze This as less than a hit. It offers an intelligent enough script, with the right ingredients: a beginning, middle, end, point, premise. There is a lot of fun in this story, and it will bring back memories which may not have been meant (there's a bar scene reminiscent of The Right Stuff).

The only problem with this film is that there is a suspicion that Robert De Niro is not quite comfortable falling apart at the scenes, he is required to have panic attacks and crying jags that just don't work. His breathing is all wrong. Yet he has played vulnerable characters in the past, So we really don't know why the panic scenes in Analyze This let the rest of the film down.

Billy Crystal plays the underachiever psychiatrist well, Liza Kudrow gives a workmanlike performance, but has little to work with. It's a good fun film, but not the best that this cast and crew could do.