Touch

Take the screenwriter from Taxi Driver, a score by a former member of Nirvana, and a story based on a crime drama by Elmore Leonard (cinema's bookend to Jim Thompson), add stud-of-the-month and Johnny Depp clone Skeet Ulrich, Bridget Fonda, and Christopher Walken -- and you'd think you'd have a pretty impressive movie. But though littered with brilliant wit, Paul Schrader's Touch is disjointed and only intermittently interesting.

Ulrich plays a somber Christ-like figure who can heal people via the wounds in his hands. He has been hidden away in a Franciscan church by the powers that be, who don't care to be upstaged by his miraculous powers. When Walken, a former man of the cloth and trailer-home salesman, gets a whiff of Ulrich's talents, he sets forth to exploit them, turning the town into a media circus. Walken and Ulrich are constrained by their flat roles, but Fonda is delightfully sensual as Walken's collaborator, who falls for Ulrich. Tom Arnold is sparingly funny as an over-committed altar boy who leads an activist group called Outrage. Touch may feel cool and hip, but the contrived direction renders it another Pulp Fiction wanna-be. At the Nickelodeon and the Harvard Square and in the suburbs.

-- Tom Meek