Scorsese's latest, Bringing Out the Dead, about a New York City paramedic on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is an aimless, stumbling bit of cinema in desperate need of medical attention -- stat! Though it shares the Taxi Driver pedigree of Scorcese and screenwriter Paul Schrader, this ain't no Ambulance Driver.

Opening with a wretched voice-over by Nicolas Cage that sounds like something from a bad Mickey Spillane novel, the film is off-kilter right out of the blocks and never finds its stride. Cage plays Frank Pierce, an Emergency Medical Services paramedic who's lost a few too many patients and is haunted by the spirit of a teenage girl as he makes his nocturnal rounds. He’s drawn to the daughter of a heart-attack patient (Patricia Arquette), and the pair strike up a tentative relationship.

Everybody in this movie hates their work, especially our "hero." Hardly the earnest medical personnel of "E.R.," the paramedics and doctors of Bringing Out The Dead have to be coerced into responding when duty calls. Pierce is so morosely diffident he's an emotional void, leaving the audience no one they can sympathize with other than the many suffering patients. That’s not good, especially when a lot of them don’t make it.

Pierce is caught in a Catch-22 that gets old fast. He's determined to get fired, but can't bring himself to quit; he’s plagued by the souls of people he couldn't save, yet is willing to sacrifice the life of one he did. When Pierce hooks up with they young woman, they connect only awkwardly via innocuous pleasantries so shallow that calling it a relationship would really be stretching things.

That we don’t give a damn about any of the characters is bad enough, but artistically Scorsese's film feels rehashed. Like After Hours, the director sends his characters through the Big Apple's labyrinth of streets in the dead of night like rats through a maze. But from crack houses and subway tunnels, to a punk dance club and a drug dealer's swank den, it's a New York we've seen before, all glossy rain-drenched streets and neon lights. The Catholic imagery borders on self-parody. The director tries to inject some much-needed cinematic life into the proceedings, but the eye-candy on display (accelerated film speeds, upside-down and sideways camera angles, swirling backgrounds) is strictly of the been-there, seen-that variety. Like everything else about the movie, it feels tired and weak. Who’d ever thought Scorsese would be played out?

The normally bankable Cage drags his feet through this film, lurching reluctantly from one scene to another like a zombie. Yeah, that’s the intent, so we guess its an effective performance, but it’s hard to call it a good one. Raccoon-eyed and sporting a three-day beard, he acts like he's just been whacked over the head with a shovel; you begin to think the film's title specifically refers to him, hang-dogged and world-weary, not the suicides and murder victims he nightly scrapes off the streets.

Cursed with the thinnest of characters, Cage's real-life wife Arquette (Stigmata) is given little to do, save pining for her ailing father and keeping Pierce at arm's length. That Bringing Out The Dead has any vital signs at all is thanks to the enlivening presence of Ving Rhames and Tom Sizemore. As two of Pierce's many EMS partners, Rhames' bible-thumping womanizer is entertainingly over-the-top, while Sizemore plays with psychotic glee a paramedic as interested in beating the crap out of his patients as he is in healing them. Unfortunately, ambulance shift rotation limits their screen time, and each ends up out of the picture all too quickly.

Since the story is virtually beside the point, one feels like Scorsese must be trying to say something -- but what? New York City makes your heart stop beating -- figuratively and literally? The characters suggest as much. Coupled with its weird quasi-religious sub-text -- paramedics playing god, statues of the Madonna topping pizzas, the film's closing, luminous pieta shot -- Bringing Out the Dead ends up more artifice than art.

Like Spike Lee's similarly awful New York pic Summer of Sam, Bringing Out The Dead leaves you wondering how a director of such ability and renown, working with a gifted cast, can misfire so badly. After all, on a set littered with defibrillators, you'd think some of that excess electrical current might have given this film a spark. As it is, Bringing Out The Dead is the most appropriately titled movie of the year: It’s DOA.

Peter Helfrich