NEW YORK MINUTE
[ 1/2] (One and one-half stars)
Double the trouble. Running time: 85 minutes. Rated PG (mild sensuality and thematic elements). At the E-Walk, the Loews 84th Street, the Orpheum, others.
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KIDS may or may not like Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s frantic, crudely constructed screwball comedy, “New York Minute,” but dirty old men in trench coats will love it.
Teetering on the brink of 18 – they reach legal age next month – the stick-thin twins are pretty and perky and seem much younger than their years.
Which makes it all the more disturbing that they spend so much of their PG-rated film titillatingly turned out in an abbreviated white towel and a microscopic bathrobe.
Ashley, playing strait-laced overachiever Jane, loses her clothes three times in the first 15 minutes, which include a peekaboo Freudian shower scene with a snake. And later there’s a weirdly gratuitous sequence in which her towel – whoops! – falls off as she is unceremoniously flung into a Dumpster full of trash.
And it’s impossible not to notice the very deliberate double-entendres written into the script by Emily Fox, Adam Cooper and Bill Collage.
“Twins? Is today my birthday?” smirks a shirtless senator’s son, played by 21-year-old actor Jared Padalecki, upon surprising the scantily clad girls in his bedroom.
Meanwhile, Jane is romanced by a bike messenger (26-year-old Riley Smith) who, at one point, leers, “I hope we bump together again.”
“Minute,” which the Olsens co-produced, should have been a wacky, slapstick lark assembled around two cute girls whose billion-dollar, multimedia empire is built on a tween fan base.
But in trying to straddle both the grown-up and kiddie worlds with this inappropriately sexualized effort – their first theatrical release since 1995’s “It Takes Two” – the Olsens have lost their footing.
The story borrows a plot point or two from the fabulous evergreen “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” but the director, TV veteran Dennie Gordon, has none of John Hughes’ finesse, and her hyperkinetic, shrill style is an assault on the senses.
The Olsen twins play feuding, polar-opposite suburban sisters who spend a frenetic day in Manhattan learning to, of course, embrace their differences.
Jane has come to New York to give an all-important speech at Columbia University in the hopes of winning a scholarship to Oxford. Her rock-star rebel sibling, Roxy (Mary-Kate), has skipped school and headed to the big city with the intention of slipping her band’s demo CD to the A&R people at a Simple Plan video shoot.
The girls unwittingly get mixed up in a music and video piracy ring, and soon they’re being pursued all over the city by the large, white adopted son of a Chinese mobster and a bumbling truancy officer (beetle-browed Eugene Levy) who, in a disconcertingly predatory way, has a fixation on Roxy.
Comedian Andy Richter, who channels Mickey Rooney in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” to play the video pirate with a fake Chinese accent, pales into insignificance amid the offensive barrage of broad racial stereotypes.