ALAN Rickman has fun playing a lecherous old bastard of a professor in “Nobel Son,” a pulpy would-be comic thriller, but the movie doesn’t deserve him.
Rickman’s arrogant chemist wins the Nobel prize, and while he’s in Stockholm to accept it, a ludicrous kidnapping plot sweeps up his son and a mysterious figure who lurks around campus (Bryan Greenberg and Shawn Hatosy, neither of whom has enough presence for his role). There’s also Eliza Dushku as a poetess who seduces the Nobelist’s son and Danny DeVito as an almost entirely irrelevant neighbor.
The dialogue clunks along like a car with a flat tire while the plot zooms back and forth in time and the soundtrack blasts electronic music in an attempt to make the farcical kidnapping scheme seem credible. Every so often the characters try to sound like intellectuals by quoting Samuel Johnson – and Pat Benatar. Except for a mildly engaging heist scene in the middle of the movie, the story never gets within a mile of the Quentin Tarantino classics it tries to evoke.
Running time: 110 minutes. Rated R (profanity, sex, nudity, graphic violence). At the Loews Village, 11th Street and Third Avenue.