54

Someone once purred that if you remembered you had a good time at Studio 54, then, darling, you didn't have a good time. In that case, it's apropos that writer/director Mark Christopher's elegy to the legendary Manhattan nightclub is dreadfully unmemorable.

Call it Boogie Nights: The Disco Remix. Indeed, the similarities between Christopher's feature debut and last year's paean to porn are as insistent as a strobe light. Ryan Phillippe (I Know What You Did Last Summer) galumphs as Shane, a Jersey City hunk with big pecs and dreams to match. Intent on ditching his Garden State roots -- "I wanna be a New Yawka" -- he dances into this glittering, late-'70s bacchanal of drugs, sex, and Donna Summer. His blank sensuality catches the coke-glazed eye of smarmy 54 owner Steve Rubell (Mike Myers), and soon Shane's shirtless, tending bar and learning the ropes from his extended Studio family, coat-check girl (Salma Hayek) and her busboy husband (Breckin Meyer). But just as ambitions swell to hubristic proportions, along come the finger-wagging '80s to impart a lesson about decadence.

What this quaalude-laced fable tells us -- over and over again in dunderheaded narration by Phillippe -- is that you can't escape the reality of who you are. And neither can 54. Phillippe can't match the heartbreaking collision of earnest naïveté and unchecked ambition of Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights; and Hayek, though charismatic, is no Julianne Moore. Meanwhile, Neve Campbell, as Phillippe's love interest, looks as if she were attending the senior prom rather than the world's most orgiastic club.

It's Austin Powers's Myers as Rubell, his first dramatic role, who rescues the film from being just an excuse for a groovy soundtrack. With his salacious hyena grin and Butthead-inflected snicker, the over-the-top Myers comes closest to embodying the dissipated mythos of the '70s hotspot. Otherwise predictable and surprisingly unsexy, 54 has all the intrigue of a night on Lansdowne Street. At the Harbour Mall, Lincoln Mall, Opera House, Showcase, Tri-Boro, and Woonsocket cinemas.

-- Alicia Potter