We're No Angels

Those who wrote off Neil Jordan as a director of comedy after High Spirits will have to think again. His first American film, scripted by David Mamet, is a nicely paced comedy of errors in which two escaped convicts, Ned (De Niro) and Jim (Penn) are mistaken for priests. The prison opening - a souped-up pastiche of old Warner Bros big-house movies, with the late Ray McAnally as the slavering, sadistic warden - is such a nightmare setting that you have to laugh. On the run, baying hounds on their trail, Ned and Jim take refuge in a monastery. Their only chance of getting across the border into Canada lies with the annual procession of monks bearing their miracle-working shrine across the bridge. Ned falls for sluttish Molly (Moore), mother of a deaf-and-dumb child, Jim for religion. De Niro's gift for pantomime, glimpsed in his plumber for Brazil, is a non-stop bombardment of mugging on the silent screen scale. There isn't much left for Penn, which is okay by me. Very entertaining.