Harry Sundown THE DEAD POOL

By RICHARD CORLISS

Twenty-five years ago, as legend has it, a genie with a six-day stubble alighted on Clint Eastwood's shoulder and vouchsafed him the secret of star acting: "Don't act. You're an icon, pal. Get used to it." The advice has served Eastwood well. From his starmaking stint as the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns to this, his fifth film as Dirty Harry Callahan, Eastwood has built a durable celebrity on his unique brand of Zen surliness. By now his character need hardly cock an eyebrow, let alone a trigger, to send supervillains hurtling to their deaths. "Go ahead, punks," he might snarl as a new legion of psychopaths butts up against his belligerence. "Make my career."

So as Harry, San Francisco's most lethal cop, Eastwood can earn both laughs and respect just by standing in a crowded elevator and grunting "Swell" to his boss. Truth is, this time around, he doesn't get to do much else. Evan Kim, as Inspector Harry's Chinese-American partner, is allowed to display some martial-arts machismo. Liam Neeson, playing a director of low-budget slasher movies who is high on Harry's list of suspects in a serial-killer case, corners the market in upscale cynicism. James Carrey gets to go fruitfully bananas as a rock star on the mainline to an early grave. And David Hunt, as a maniac film fancier named Harlan, provides the jolt of menace. Hunt can even terrify a film critic before slicing her to shreds -- the ultimate negative review. No such fun for Clint; he mainly stands there and simmers.

Oh, Harry may shoot or squash or harpoon the odd malefactor. He may find fellowship with Patricia Clarkson, a Sondra Locke look-alike who plays a prying TV reporter. And he does get to drive in the big chase scene, in which a remote-controlled toy car with explosives attached hounds Harry through the town's roller-coaster streets. True Californians, he and his partner never think to get out and run for cover. But then, this picture's soul is located 400 miles south, in the Los Angeles movie industry, where metaphorical backstabbing is business as usual. "It's not a rip-off," says the slasher auteur about his latest film. "It's a homage." That must make The Dead Pool a homage to every action thriller since Little Caesar. It is also, with its clued-in cynicism and some snazzy repartee, maybe the best movie ever directed by a man named Buddy. And it surely proves that when it comes to sulfurous star quality, the genie was right.