Brad Pitt has five good minutes in ``Meet Joe Black.'' They come in his first scene, in which he plays a handsome, nice-guy lawyer, new in town, who hits on a woman in a coffee shop. He smiles easily. He talks briskly, without the usual cotton in his mouth, and he looks at the other actor without seeming as if he's thinking about how good he looks while looking.

　　 Then disaster strikes -- for the lawyer, for the film and for Pitt's performance. The lawyer is killed, and next time we see Brad, he is playing the Angel of Death, who just happens to be incarnated in the lawyer's body. Death has chosen well. With his hair bleached blond, Pitt has never looked better. But whoever cast this movie has chosen miserably.

　　 It's not just that Pitt's performance is bad. It hurts. There were moments I wanted to cry, ``Medic!'' Watching Pitt struggle, with inert face and glazed eyes, to make an audience believe that he knows all the mysteries of death and eternity is painful. Where was Nicolas Cage? I'd have taken even Keanu Reeves.

　　
A FUNNY, MENACING DEATH
``Meet Joe Black,'' which opens today, is a remake of Mitchell Leisen's 1934 classic, ``Death Takes a Holiday,'' in which Fredric March played Death as a brooding romantic.

　　 In the new film, from director Martin Brest (``Scent of a Woman''), Death is partly comic, partly menacing. He's an innocent having his first experiences inside a human body -- so there's all this shtick about his dis covering peanut butter, for example. He's also cold and unsympathetic.

　　 The most curious thing about ``Meet Joe Black'' is that it's not terrible. It should be. First, there's the black hole of Pitt's performance. Then there's the little fact that the movie goes on for almost three hours when two would have been plenty.

　　 Yet the picture never quite loses the audience, thanks to gripping story lines and to the other actors in the cast. Particularly, Anthony Hopkins.

　　 Hopkins plays a communications magnate named Parrish, a mini-Ted Turner who, days before his 65th birthday, is visited by Death. Parrish's time is up, but Death will let him stay alive as long as Parrish can keep Death amused by life on Earth. Death accompanies him everywhere. Parrish introduces him to people as ``Joe Black.''

　　 Hopkins' acting is so emotionally full that the tiniest moments -- as when he improvises Death's alias -- ring with complexities of thought and feeling. Acting such as Hopkins' makes the cinema as rich and full as poetry.

　　
DEATH IS ROMANTIC
``Meet Joe Black'' follows two parallel tracks, a business end and a romantic end. Parrish, an old-time, sleeves-rolled-up entrepreneur, 英语影评 trying to fight off a possible merger with a bigger firm. Meanwhile, Death is taking a romantic interest in Parrish's daughter Susan, played by Claire Forlani.

　　 Forlani, in her first big Hollywood film, is shown to best advantage in her scenes opposite Hopkins, in which we get to see her abilities go beyond an offbeat beauty. Her scenes with Pitt are more difficult -- he gives her nothing and just stands there like a zombie while her eyes mist up. Still, Forlani and Pitt have two of the more kissable lips in movies, so their kissing scenes are at least pretty.

　　 Yet the romance becomes ridiculous as the movie wears on. Susan is in love with Joe, not because of anything to do with Joe or Death but because she met and fell in love with the lawyer, whose spirit originally inhabited that body.

　　 Despite the soaring soundtrack, this is nothing but a case of mistaken identity. She doesn't love Death for his mind but for the body he stole.

　　 What a bad break. The guy's cute and he's straight, but he's the Angel of Death.

　　 In three hours, ``Meet Joe Black'' goes no deeper than that.