Hawks (1990)

Hawks is a movie to fill the aching void in your soul on those mornings you wake up thinking, ''Gosh, I'd really like to see a meditation on mortality based on an idea by one of the Bee Gees.''

Timothy Dalton and Anthony Edwards are cast here as the Huck and Jim of the terminal cancer set in a movie conceived by Barry Gibb. Tired of waiting for death, they escape from the ward for one last life-affirming fling.

What follows is an encounter with a sentimental old hooker and a god-awful romantic bicycle sequence cribbed directly from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And while no one in his right mind expects deep thought from Gibb (whose soundtrack songs don't exactly function as a Greek chorus), the banality of the script seems a real depressant to the actors: Dalton, the current James Bond, looks lost without a gun in his hand, and his chemistry with the usually appealing Edwards is sub-Martin and Lewis. Only the presence of a couple of familiar Britcom faces (including Fawlty Towers' Connie Booth) makes this even remotely watchable.

If you really want to learn a black comic lesson about gazing into the abyss, rent Burt Reynolds in The End instead. C-

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