Fatal Flaws

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Week after week, the sanctity of human life, the moral niceties of medical ethics, the nobility of self-sacrifice. After all that tenderness, it's easy to see why bright young Peter Berg, one of the Chicago Hope ensemble, would want to try a little purgative transgressiveness.

Hence the very black comedy Very Bad Things, which he has written and di-rected. In it, five thirtysomething guys from a Los Angeles suburb go off to Las Vegas for a bachelor party a week before one of them is to be married. It turns wild: a call girl accidentally gets killed, a security guard gets murdered, the boys--led by Christian Slater, doing a nice, nasty turn spouting pop-psych Nietzscheanisms--get started on a cover-up. Guilt and panic soon lead to lethal wrangles, then to variously colorful comeuppances. Meantime, Cameron Diaz is sublimely screwy as the single-minded bride determined not to let anything--including the deadly mishaps that keep shrinking the wedding party--spoil her nuptials.

Within the chicly amoral terms Berg sets--and brutally enforces--Diaz is curiously believable. So is the way in which stunned calm (we're going to get away with this thing) and hysteria (no, we're not) alternate among the well-played accidental criminals. We do find points of identification with them. And heaven knows, some of us are fed up to the teeth with movies glossily restating humane sentiments. Finally, though, Berg's relentless, youthfully enthusiastic assault on conventional pieties grows tiresome. And we begin to choke on laughter that was from the outset pretty dubious.

--R.S.