Robert DeNiro Makes Billy Crystal An Overly Familiar Offer He Can't Refuse In Analyze This

Looking over Billy Crystal's IMDb recently, I was surprised to realize that the guy was never really a prominent fixture of American cinema. He's done a number of hugely popular movies like When Harry Met Sally, City Slickers and the two Monsters Inc. features of course, but aside from a brief period in the last few years of the 1990's, he was never a Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler or Melissa McCarthy type figure who was doing one or two comedies annually. The guy's etched his way into being a perennial staple of American pop culture by way of being a superb awards host and stand-up comic but he was the kind of the fellow who just seemed to do comedy feature films infrequently.

One of his more popular films (one of only three live-action films he's starred in that have grossed over $100 million in fact) was the 1999 comedy Analyze This, a Harold Ramis directed motion picture that paired Crystal with Robert DeNiro and had the two lampoon DeNiro's recurring penchant for playing mobster characters which had extended well into the 1990's with stuff like Casino and Goodfellas. Here, DeNiro plays Paul Vitti, a mobster whose just lost a dear colleague in a rain of gunfire and is dealing with a sudden onset of emotions he's never had to grapple with before like stress and outright woe.

With a big mobster meeting on the way, Paul Vitti decides to handle his internal problems with a mild-mannered psychiatrist, Ben Sobel (Billy Crystal), a man who's suffering from his own feelings of nervousness surrounding his impending marriage to Laura MacNamara (Lisa Kudrow) and his feelings of inadequacies compared to his psychiatrist father who's recently published a book. Ben Sobel is basically intimidated within an inch of his life to take on Paul Vitti as a client, with their work together managing to unearth plenty of hidden trauma Vitti has been carrying around while putting on the persona of a remorseless mob boss.

Analyze This marked the start of Robert DeNiro playing his legacy of mobster and overall intimidating roles for yuks, as seen in the succeeding years by projects like the Fockers movie, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and of course, the only current 21st-century collaboration between DeNiro and Martin Scorsese, Shark Tale. It's interesting to think of this particular Harold Ramis film being the start of a new era in the legendary actor's career but in terms of his work in this movie, DeNiro is fine playing a pastiche of every big mobster character ever and pairing him up with the more paranoid everyman character played by Billy Crystal inspires some chuckles.

The rapport between the two leads provides some successful gags as does a number of lines by more dense mobster henchman Jelly (Joe Viterelli). I seriously wish there were more in the way of really inspired gags in Analyze This though, as too many of the gags are just boilerplate references to other mobster movies, most explicitly in a dream sequence Ben Sobel has wherein the famous Godfather scene where Marlon Brando gets shot at while he's shopping for produce is recreated with his character filling in for Brando. There isn't much in the way of humor here beyond just "Look at this thing you recognize!" and a subplot involving an antagonistic mobster played by Chazz Palminteri gets sunk by being nothing more than overly familiar.

Still, legendary comedy director Harold Ramis has enough comedic chops to lend some actual directorial skill to the project with even that aforementioned unimaginative Godfather parody scene does have some nice subtle visual touches evoking the original sequence it's lampooning. He's also got the good sense to just keep things simple and let extended scenes focus on Crystal and DeNiro trading humorous barbs (the best of which may be an extended riff on DeNiro's character confused about the concept of an Oedipus complex) with each other. Their interactions help keep Analyze This amusing even if it really does feel like it needed more inventive humor in place of overly familiar pop culture references.