Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, August 14, 1993                   TAG: 9309120249
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: B10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CARRIE RICKEY KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

Although director Ron Underwood tries to infuse the movie with the poignancy of his hit, ``City Slickers,'' there is so much miasma here that you can't see the inspiration for the fog.

``Heart and Souls''' plot is so convoluted that it could easily take the film's entire 104 minutes just to render a brief description.

Here goes: In 1959, four San Franciscans board a city bus. Each of the passengers is in the midst of resolving a major life crisis - i.e., should the cute waitress leave the city and go back to Podunk to marry her farmer beau? - when the bus has a collision that is fatal to the riders. Their spirits get trapped on Earth and attach themselves to a newborn who was delivered in a car adjacent to the bus wreck.

Only Thomas, the newborn, can see these characters - who amuse the boy until he's about 7 and the audience has grown whiskers. They disappear when Thomas gets sent to the school psychiatrist for talking to ``his secret friends.'' They reappear 20 years later when they see Thomas (Robert Downey Jr.) wasting his life by putting more emphasis on career than on affairs of the heart.

Are you still with me?

``Heart and Souls'' is, in a word, overcomplicated. It's a rush-hour traffic jam of hearts and souls, not to mention other vital organs belonging to its uniquely gifted ensemble cast. (Apart from Downey, ``Heart and Souls'' can boast Charles Grodin, Alfre Woodard and Kyra Sedgwick.)

Fully half the film has passed before Underwood reveals to us why we're invited to this ghostly party: In trying to save Thomas, his guardian angels unexpectedly realize why their spirits haven't yet ascended or descended to wherever. It hits them that Thomas is THEIR angel: Each can inhabit his body and resolve the conflicts he or she were struggling with before the fatal crash.

Thus each actor must ``enter'' Downey, hazarding a variation of the scene in ``Ghost'' where Patrick Swayze's spirit inhabits Whoopi Goldberg's body. While this schtick was much funnier when Lily Tomlin invaded Steve Martin in ``All of Me,'' Downey is such a consummate comedian that however difficult ``Heart and Souls'' is to watch, it's a delight to see him ``doing'' Grodin or Woodard.

Downey, the boy with the basset-hound face, is a brilliant embodier of other actors, which is quite different from being a mere mimic. Alas, the movie he's trapped in is mere mimicry of other, better supernatural comedies, and once again the considerable talents of this frighteningly talented actor are squandered.

\ HEART AND SOULS

Rated PG-13 for profanity, sexual scenes, morbidity. Playing at Valley View Mall 6.