INEMA / Some giggles, but no guts: Death Becomes Her (PG); Slacker (15)

HOW MUCH fun is Meryl Streep? In Plenty and Sophie's Choice she was no more approachable than liquid nitrogen, but recently there have been signs that the ice-queen might care to melt. And so it proves in Death Becomes Her, directed by Robert Zemeckis. Streep plays Madeline Ashton, a star beginning to lose her glare. We first see her slinking down a stairway under purple lights, in a Broadway version of Sweet Bird of Youth. Zemeckis pitches this just where it belongs, right at the bottom of the heap: a fake Streisand warble, lyrics based almost solely on the phrase 'That's me]', and feathers moulting off Madeline's boa. What's more, the year is 1978, which means that half-way through the rhythm accelerates to disco and everyone starts to behave like a train - random whoop-whistles and mad signals at the ceiling. This is fast work: a whole decade damned to hell, and we still haven't got past the credits.

Tucked away in the audience is Madeline's old mate Helen (Goldie Hawn), complete with straight dowdy haircut and matching boyfriend Ernest (Bruce Willis). They go backstage, where he drools over Madeline's performance, and she breathes back: 'D'you think I'm starting to need you?' It's a great goofy line, dripping not just with silly love but with the stirrings of panic; for Ernest is a plastic surgeon, and Madeline's plastic is starting to untuck at the edges. Death Becomes Her, at least in these early stages, is a steely skit on the wishes of human vanity, the ludicrous lengths to which people will go to stop the mortal rot. Streep seems to enjoy herself here - she gets high on bitchiness, as if it were a new temperamental toy she just found under the bed. And Zemeckis has no qualms about pushing things along at a runaway canter. He cuts straight from Ernest denying all interest in Madeline to a shot of their wedding - the sort of thing Preston Sturges used to do, outsmarting our expectations and to hell with credibility.

This go-for-it comedy is fine as long as you know where it is. When Zemeckis directed Back to the Future, he made the time-hopping feel urgent, and the jokes all flushed and breathless. It was like having a whole audience run to catch a train. Death Becomes Her kicks off like this, and just about keeps going till half-time. There's a lovely mock-Gothic scene in which a despairing Madeline drives off to see Lisle Von Rhuman, who holds the secret of eternal life. Since she's played by Isabella Rossellini, this seems more than likely. Certainly the first shot of her is the kind of thing you want to put on hold and watch for a couple of million years. Round the back of the chair comes that feline face - a Lulu haircut, Ingrid lips and one ear covered in gold.

She offers Madeline a magic phial. The stuff inside looks like Pepto-Bismol, and may indeed cure indigestion; the side-effect, though, is that you live for ever. Madeline - and, it turns out, Helen as well - can be knocked around, punted downstairs and warped out of shape, but she'll never die. A pity you can't say the same for the film. A twist like this pulls open all manner of possibilities, but they are technical ones, not dramatic. You can just imagine Zemeckis and his team taking one look at the script and scrambling for their computers.

What they should have done, of course, is reached for their Tennyson. There they would have found 'Tithonus', a useful guide to their chosen plot. Tithonus, like Madeline, asked for life everlasting but forgot to ask if he could remain young. From that mistake Tennyson created one of the finest short poems in the language, not least because it tells of the longest life in history. Its beauty is that of suspended animation, poised amid the terrors of plotlessness. The unending existence is one in which everything happens and nothing matters. In Hollywood terms, this is bad news. There's only one thing for it: wheel on the special effects.

The hi-tech highlights of the film are already visible on the posters, in the trailers and television clips - a strange decision, rather like giving away the murderer. By now, most viewers will know that Meryl Streep's head swivels round and gets smacked down below her shoulder-blades, and that Goldie Hawn has a football-sized hole where her intestine should be - the ultimate diet control, I suppose. All this is amazing rather than convincing, and it doesn't lead anywhere. Streep actually grows more conciliatory as the movie proceeds: death benumbs her. Mind you, she's still a jumping bean compared to Bruce Willis, who seems to have drunk the magic potion, arranged for his body to carry on acting, and left the set in a sulk.

As for Goldie Hawn, it was cruel casting to begin with, asking her to play someone hell-bent on perpetual youth, and no wonder she refuses to send herself up. But nor is there much room for her plucky, chin-up sense of humour; black comedy reduces her to fumbling around in the dark, sounding merely petulant when she needs to hiss with cold vengeance. In one scene she gamely pads up into a real fatty, compounded by a camera at buttock-level, but all you can think of is the willowy woman lost inside. What this film needs is someone with honest Bunter experience, someone who has, in her time, known both the lovely and the lardy sides of life. In short, it needs Elizabeth Taylor. My, what a comeback that would have been.

As it is, Zemeckis keeps his cowardly distance from bad taste; he makes an inoffensive picture on a yuck subject, even rounding it off with a church sermon on the joys and virtues of authentic old age. Bah] Death Becomes Her ventures into Sunset Boulevard territory, with ageing harpies clattering around the castles that Hollywood likes to imagine looming over its own back yard. That in itself is a rich, neurotic fancy; Billy Wilder's film caught the disease of tacky illusions and wouldn't let go. Zemeckis feels safer with a good stunt - the battlements only exist for the hero to hang from at the climax. As in all his work, there's much to enjoy along the way - 'could you just not breathe?' Madeline snaps at Ernest - but none of the tension that black farce demands, nothing to recoil from at the same time.

Slacker is a film about boredom, but manages - by a whisker - not to be boring itself. The camera saunters through Austin, Texas, picking up one character after the next. Though it has the roughness and ramble of documentary, Richard Linklater's movie is really a bunch of short stories - talking heads on the move, some of them cropped off by casual framing. 'This town has always had its fair share of crazies,' muses one old man. 'I wouldn't live anywhere else.' Linklater overdoes the crazies - too many conspiracy nutters rabbiting on about JFK and secret moonshots. I preferred the car bores, the shoplifter and the Scooby Doo addict, plain people spinning out their days. You keep hoping that these fragmented lives will join up, but the movie keeps shaking the jigsaw; by the end, you wonder how they could possibly find a common purpose, or any purpose at all. The aimlessness is deliberate, of course; you can almost smell the indifference, emotional and political, seeping out of Austin and across the country. Thank God for the dry jokes, and the mad dance of the final sequence; it looks like an old Beatles movie with a dash of colour, though not even Ringo would have chucked the camera over a cliff. Probably not, anyway.

'Death Becomes Her' (PG): Empire (497 9999), MGM Baker St (935 9772), Fulham Rd (373 6990) & Trocadero (434 0032), Whiteleys (792 3324); 'Slacker' (15): Metro (734 1506). All numbers are 071.