There are many movies that are worse than Norman Mailer’s “Wild 90”; there was one just a week ago, called “The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz.” But “Wild 90” is the worst movie that I’ve stayed to see all the way through. Unlike poor “Paula Schultz,” it’s terrible in ways that are portentous. And, grindingly boring as it is, it has something going for it: our curiosity about what Mailer is doing in it, and why, and what he thinks he’s doing. The gangster character he plays is called the Prince. Lording it over his unappealing chums, he’s a growling, grunting, waddling little star, a miniaturized big-brawler who looks and sounds surprisingly like Victor McLaglen in “The Informer.” It must have taken a Harvard man many years of practice to achieve that low-life effect; he didn’t acquire it just for the movie. And surely it isn’t the Mafia man he pretends to play but Mailer the fantasist who gets punch-drunk from shadowboxing. And it’s Mailer the great lover who, in a scene with his wife, rivals the Burtons at embarrassing us...

Mailer’s recent long, rambling essay “Some Dirt in the Talk: A Candid History of an Existential Movie Called ‘Wild 90’ ” (written, apparently, to help publicize the movie, although it should, if there is any justice in the arts, long survive the film) has some passages that are as good as anything ever written about movies, and a few paragraphs on Hollywood and acting that are unequalled. But when he explains what he is doing in “Wild 90,” he is self-serving. As a solution to the problem of awareness of the camera in documentaries, Mailer proposes what he calls “existential” acting, by which he means improvising within given roles in a given situation... It’s a bit like a man who has just written his first poem and announces the discovery of free verse.