`Mr. Destiny' Has Been Done Before - And Much Better

XX ``Mr. Destiny,'' with James Belushi, Linda Hamilton, Michael Caine, Jon Lovitz, Hart Bochner. Directed by James Orr, from a script by Orr and Jim Cruickshank. Alderwood, Aurora Village, King, Overlake, Renton Village, Seatac Mall. ``PG-13'' - Parental guidance advised, due to language.

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The day after seeing ``Mr. Destiny,'' I caught the season opener of NBC's enjoyable time-travel series, ``Quantum Leap,'' which contained so many plot similarities that I developed a near-terminal case of deja vu.

Not that ``Mr. Destiny'' doesn't already remind you of half a dozen other Hollywood fantasies in which the hero experiences an alternate version of his life. Much of the script plays like an unofficial remake of the final third of ``It's a Wonderful Life,'' and there are equally large lifts from ``Field of Dreams,'' ``The Natural,'' ``Back to the Future'' and the 1985 Robin Williams comedy, ``The Best of Times.''

But ``Quantum Leap'' did it with class and heart. ``Mr. Destiny,'' created by the writing team responsible for ``Three Men and a Baby,'' is a slickly contrived studio product, as insincere as it is ineffectual. Only Michael Caine, who hasn't much screen time but sparkles in the title role, manages to get through lines like ``Destiny's a pretty big concept when you think about it.''

Caine is cast as the bartender at a fantasy bar called The Universal Joint, where a depressed office worker named Larry Burrows (Jim Belushi) ends up drinking on his 35th birthday. He's just lost his job, his wife (Linda Hamilton) appears to have forgotten that today is special, their lazy contractor can't be persuaded to finish the driveway to their suburban home, and Larry has taken to eating freeze-dried coffee straight from the jar.

The bartender mixes another kind of drink, ``the spilt milk'' (``the one drink there's no use crying over,'' Caine advises), that allows Larry to see what his life would have been like if he hadn't lost a crucial 1970 high-school baseball game at Renaissance Field (love those hints at what's coming). Larry has spent so much of his life regretting that failure that his wife always knows why he's in a bad mood (``Honey, were you thinking about that silly ball game?'').

The bartender gives him the chance to go back and make it right. Trouble is, winning the game triggers so many other changes that 1990 becomes unrecognizable. Larry ends up living in an alternative universe in which he turns his back on his childhood buddy (Jon Lovitz) and marries the boss's daughter rather than his childhood sweetheart. Worse, he finds himself leading an empty life as a union-busting yuppie in an amoral nightmare village where it's taken for granted that everyone's parents are divorced.

In other hands, with a cast equal to Caine, this script might have made a tolerable vehicle. Not entirely witless, it has some whimsical fun with Larry's attempts to win back his ``first'' wife, who has become a union organizer and is intrigued and baffled by the fact that this apparent enemy knows so much about her.

But Belushi's acting is so neatly packaged, so unsurprising, that he seems like an understudy, a stand-in, rather than the movie's star. Although Hamilton fares better, her character is insubstantial. The first-time director, James Orr, is always two or three steps behind the audience, which probably wouldn't mind the familiarity of the story if Orr would just pick up the pace.

Caine treats each of his scenes with just the right weight. Whether he's sprinkling pixie dust while explaining how one altered event can affect everything that follows, or slyly acknowledging that he's been known ``to make a few adjustments,'' or taunting Larry with the consequences of his desires (``You don't expect everything to be perfect, do you?''), he's just as wry, wise and mischievous as he's supposed to be.