Surprise, surprise. Buck Adams, under the civilian name Charles Allen stars in and directs a cops and drug dealers movie. Then again that's like saying Jane Fonda's made another exercise video and CNN has made it the evening's lead story.

Adams, the Jimmy Cagney of XXX, is a guy whose tough-guy mug is custom made for the shoot 'em up genre. His screen credits such as Public Enemy, Under the Law, Legal Tender, Marina Vice and Lethal Passion certainly give him enough merit badges in sex and gun play, and Buck displays a creditable accumulation of ring savvy, bringing Uninhibited some fashionably attractive realism.

While the screen credits point to at least three casting agents, one suspects that the choices for leads were made simply by wheel of fortune finger tripping through the pages of AVN. The film is loaded to the gills with top name XXX and former XXX stars.

Looking a little like the Pillsbury Doughboy around the middle, Buck plays an alcohol-dissipated "Hawaii Five-O" cop (he seems to have porked up for the role like De Niro in Raging Bull) partner (Sean Michaels) gets gunned down during a busted drug raid. Buck goes a little off the deep end, granted, the shallow portion of the deep end, as Mel Gibson does in Lethal Weapon whereby he tries to end the movie in the second reel by blowing his brains out.

Cooler heads prevail, and, consequently, Buck's personal mission becomes one of nailing the bad guys, all of whom seem to dress out of the John Woo catalogue. The lead scumbag is a ponytailed drug kingpin named Escobar (Tony Montana). He's the point man in a heroin deal with the Gambino family, headed by Rocco. Montana's character which is drawn straight out of the Al Pacino-Scarface playbook (his XXX name is the ultimate irony), is possibly the film's most engaging element. After a suspension, then reinstatement, Buck is forced to accept a female partner (K.C. Williams), and the two of them, requisitely, hit it off like bourbon and a drunk dri-ving beef as they try to nail Escobar and Gambino.

With just enough gratuitous T & A activity (some zesty-looking women parading throughout) to keep the stew tasty, Uninhibited is as sharp and attractive, cosmetically, as any film in the erotic B-movie genre, can possibly hope to look. Granted the script comes off like a perfunctory writing exercise in Miami Vice 101 (for instance, one gathers the action is supposed to be taking place in Oahu yet Escobar lives "near the Hollywood sign"— I suppose you make a left at Honolulu and a right at Sunset Boulevard), and has enough wooden lines to build a picket fence around Jack Lord's house, but the cast is well adapted to its design and purpose. Uninhibited should score major points with video audiences into cops, babes, and over-the-top macho nihilism.