You know how it is, you wait years for a Freud-meets-The-Family comedy, then two fetch up at once. On the box - delight of delights - it's David Chase's The Sopranos, the best thing on TV in the last five years, with James Gandolfini wonderful as the anxiety-afflicted Mob boss. And now cinema's rejoinder in Analyze This, wherein Robert De Niro's mobster, having ducked one too many bullets with his name on them, seeks comfort in the psychoanalytical arms of Jewish therapist Billy Crystal. Goodfellas was never like this.

De Niro is Paul Vitti, celeb New York gangster who would rather recent health troubles were down to a dickey ticker than panic attacks. Heart is good, anxiety weakness - and there's no place for weakness with a big Mob sit-down in two weeks. And especially not if rival Primo (Chazz Palminteri) is breathing down your neck. So Vitti secretly turns to Ben Sobel (Crystal), a successful psychiatrist with a teenage son (the droll Kyle Sahib) and TV reporter fiancée (Lisa Kudrow).

Inevitably this remains a virtual two-hander, with both leads very good in very different roles. De Niro plays straight, carrying the weight of a hundred other gangsters on his shoulders; physically he's Jimmy in Goodfellas. That way he doesn't have to try too hard to convince us that, security blanket or not, the doc could just as easily get whacked as any rival. Occasional moments aside - his crying jags and menacing warnings ("I turn fag, you die") - the comic burden falls on Crystal whose motormouth shtick, for once, is up to it.

That concentration does count against the picture elsewhere, though. Palminteri and especially Kudrow (the one Friends refugee with a future) are wasted in what are little more than cameos. Only the rotund, punch-nosed Joe Viterelli as Jelly, Vitti's batman whose devotion to the boss is rivalled only by the depths of his own stupidity, has any impact. A star turn.

But Viterelli or not, nothing can lift the pancake-flat climax. Sure, the film works to the big sit-down, but it's as though each writer was banking on the other to rescue it. In the end it's left entirely to Crystal to carry on with what looks to be furious but uninspired improv. The film goes out on a whimper - and a good Tony Bennett gag - and not the expected bang.

Analyze This is both cruder and less cruel than The Sopranos. Its pretensions to humanity - all Hollywood comedies have at least some pretensions towards humanity - are better signposted. It's a comedy, it makes you laugh. Bada-bing, bada-bang, Betty Boop. Forgetaboutit.