For those viewers who haven't seen The Hospital (1971) or Brittania Hospital (1982), this darkly comic satire about people dying in a money-hungry hospital might seem fresh and wickedly funny. Others may find the tale of a doctor (James Spader) caught in the middle of a lawsuit between half-sisters over the fate of their comatose father tasteless or cliched. Whatever the case, there are some amusing wrinkles, including Wallace Shawn as an emissary of the Devil, Helen Mirren as a compassionate nurse driven to mercy-killing, and Albert Brooks as a drunken, forgetful doctor who tries to teach young Spader his cynically greedy philosophy of medicine. Although much of its satire seems trite or blatant, and its irreverence is not for all tastes, Critical Care is quite funny, oddly spiritual, and even somewhat touching.