An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn suffers from an overdose of meta. Not content to focus on a disconcerted director who just happens to be named Alan Smithee, nor to have actually become an Alan Smithee film when Arthur Hiller took his name off the project (seemingly a publicity stunt), the film also features people playing themselves, and several actors (Eric Idle, Ryan O'Neal) playing fictitious characters who make joke references to their real selves. Confused? Writer Joe Eszterhas wants you to be, or rather, he wants you to get lost in his "cleverness." Unfortunately for Eszterhas, no one did, constituting an implicit rejection of that self-congratulatory quality that infests Eszterhas' whole body of work, for which he has been highly compensated. The film aims to be a debauched satire, but it's permeated with a kind of sick sleaziness that goes beyond thematic. It's truly dispiriting that Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, Jackie Chan, and Harvey Weinstein (among others) debased themselves for this confused inside joke -- though perhaps Hiller's original vision made more sense. Not only is Eszterhas' script witless, but his attempts at wit are shackled to the brief cultural moment in which they were written, featuring a surplus of jokes about Hugh Grant, O.J. Simpson, and Michael Ovitz. The flimsy plot carries Idle's Smithee on an abrupt and logic-free journey from reel thief with a bounty on his head, to redeemed industry hero and hot property. The addressing-the-camera interview format doesn't work either, giving mockumentaries a bad name while simultaneously failing to qualify for the category through sheer massive implausibility. That Burn Hollywood Burn may actually be a worse film than "Trio," the fictional Chan-Stallone-Goldberg turkey it satirizes, may be a victory for ironists. But it leaves the audience as unqualified losers.