Volere Volare

Maurizio Nichetti ("The Icicle Thief," "Allegro Non Troppo") is a comic marvel on the screen, creating some hilarious slapstick set-pieces that are absolutely riotous.

Unfortunately, there are too many setups and not nearly enough payoffs in his latest uneven venture, "Volere Volare."

Nichetti, who also co-wrote and co-directed, stars as a soundeffects engineer who spends his days with a microphone, gathering various odd sound effects, and his evenings dubbing them over cartoons.

Some of the animated characters from these cartoons occasionally leap from the screen into Nichet-ti's pocket, then escape out into the world — though, for some reason, this unexpectedly charming and amusing twist is never really followed up.

Nichetti's brother, a partner in their business, does another kind of film dubbing later in the evenings — porno films, for which he recruits beautiful women who speak various languages. Then he has them disrobe and moan and groan for the soundtrack.

Meanwhile, the film spends an equal amount of time with a local prostitute (Angela Finocchiaro), who helps her clients act out weird fantasy fetishes — but does not allow any of them to touch her.

Eventually, Nichetti and Finoc-chiaro meet and begin a tenuous romance. But things get really complicated on their first date when Nichetti, for some inex-plicable reason, begins to evolve into a Toon, a la "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." First his hands take on an animated life of their own, becoming big, yellow cartoon gloves, which get fresh with Finocchiaro, much to Nichetti's chagrin. And eventually, he actually becomes a cartoon character. But Finocchiaro decides he's not all that different than he was as a human.

None of this is ever explained, as if the episodic moments are funny enough or fascinating or insightful enough to simply sustain audience sympathy and interest on their own. They aren't.

Nichetti may feel he's making some kind of satirical comment on modern society's obsessions with sex but he is instead merely exploiting and indulging the same kind of material.

And it's really too bad since so many sequences in the film are so genuinely funny. Eventually, however, it all begins to unravel and the film simply wears out its welcome.

By the way, "Volere Volare," according to press material, is Italian for "I Want to Fly." What that has to do with this movie is anyone's guess.

It is rated R, which it deserves for considerable nudity, sexual material, vulgar sexual discussion and comic violence.