Bringing Out the Dead

Maybe you can go home again. For the first time since 1990's Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese is back on New York's mean streets with another tale of a lost soul's desperate search for redemption. Based on the book by Joe Connelly and written for the screen by Paul Schrader, this expressionistic, hell-bent nocturnal odyssey echoes Scorsese's classic Taxi Driver. Unlike Travis Bickle, however, seriously burnt-out paramedic Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage in perhaps his best performance since his Oscar-winning turn in Leaving Las Vegas) doesn't want to kill people; he wants to save them. But, as he despairs in rueful voice-over, he hasn't saved anyone in months. Over the course of 56 hours, working the graveyard shift with a series of increasingly unstable partners (detached John Goodman, zealot Ving Rhames, abusive Tom Sizemore), Pierce will be hard put simply to save himself. Scorsese is a virtuoso, and collaborating with Schrader (who also wrote Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ), he seems particularly jazzed to be back on his home turf. But he's let down by members of his ensemble (including Patricia Arquette as the not-so-subtly-named Mary, a reformed addict, and salsa star Marc Anthony as a not-so-convincing derelict) and the story, whose authentic touches (Connelly was a paramedic) fail to stop the hemorrhage of TV medical drama clichés such as the requisite chaotic overworked ER. Optional. (K. Lee Benson)