Main cast: Robert De Niro (Paul Vitti), Billy Crystal (Ben Sobel), Lisa Kudrow (Laura MacNamara Sobel), Joe Viterelli (Jelly), and Cathy Moriarty-Gentile (Patty LoPresti)
Director: Harold Ramis

Horse, meet flog. Horse, die.

A tired and pointless retread of the much better 1999 comedy Analyze This, but then again, most sequels can’t hold up to the original. Still, there’s no excuse for Analyze That to be so unfunny and clumsy.

Ben Sobel, psychiatrist to the mob, and his now-wife Laura are attending his father’s funeral when he gets a call. His former patient Paul Vitti seems to have gone crazy, singing I Feel Pretty just like how Lurch the Butler would if you pump that guy with drugs. The FBI decides to hand over Vitti to the care of Ben, much to Laura’s consternation. But Ben and Laura will be even more unhappy when Paul gets them all tangled up with his feud with ambitious mob widow Patty LoPresti and more.

This movie would have been so much funnier if Robert De Niro hadn’t repeated his same “funny mob guy or dangerous cop” routine in what seems like eight million movies in the years between Analyze This and Analyze That. If Billy Crystal and Joe Viterelli don’t seem like sleepwalking through the movie. And they still can’t find anything for Lisa Kudrow to do in this movie, just like they have no idea what to do with her in the 1999 original.

Lumbering towards the finish line like a geriatric old coot wheezing his last breath through an artificial respirator, this pointless sequel feels tired and half-baked and hence totally irrelevant as a movie. There’s no deep analysis to be made in this scenario: the cast probably just need the paycheck to pay off the bills.