This review was written for the drops we created to slip into regular programming after the weekly radio show ended in 1993. I can tell from the script that it was written on the already-antiquated computer that resided on the desk of the closet-sized manager’s office in the movie theater where I worked. It’s one big block of all-capitalized text, making it brutally difficult to read during the recording process. I see I was pushing back against the critical instinct to overpraise the supposed deeper meanings of Eastwood’s directorial efforts even then. And I’m somewhat surprised that “Lazy charm” was already a criticism that could be lobbed at Costner, but there it is.

With last year’s deserving Oscar winner “Unforgiven,” Clint Eastwood crafted a meticulous deconstructing of the American western and his own image. Though the film was truly terrific, those who praised it as a landmark tended to forget that Eastwood had already begun chipping away at the genre with previous efforts “The Outlaw Josey Wales” and “Pale Rider.” Those who felt the film was a revelation apparently hadn’t paid attention to Eastwood’s previous work.

With his latest directorial effort, “A Perfect World,” Eastwood relates the story of an escaped felon and the Texas Ranger chasing after him, and some have already overanxiously proclaimed the film features the subversion of the typical Eastwood cop. If that’s what you’re looking for, find the largely forgotten mid-eighties film “Tightrope” in your local video store, since the pursuing police officer in the new film is mainly an annoying distraction from the best part of the movie, the relationship that develops between the fleeing criminal and the young boy he adopts as a hostage. Kevin Costner plays the criminal as a highly intelligent decent man with slight but telling glimpses at the hardened soul that landed him in prison in the first place. His better qualities are brought out by the boy, played by newcomer T.J. Lowther with the tentative, awkward grin of a youngster unaccustomed to smiling.

Lowther comes from a family wounded by a father who ran out, leading Costner to to compensate for his own dysfunctional childhood by striving to be a suitable father figure for the boy. He delivers bits of wisdom and gives the boy the chance to do things he’d never experienced, such as trick-or-treating. Costner has an instinctive need to protect those two weak to protect themselves, a need that leads to the film’s most touching passages. And towards the end, its most chilling. These two characters hold the film together, as the relationship develops in believable, fascinating ways. Costner is in especially fine form, not content to rely on lazy charm, as he has been at times in recent years, but instead delivering a tricky, complex performance that stands as his best since 1988’s “Bull Durham.”

Unfortunately, the film suffers from a slow-moving two-hour-and-fifteen-minute running time. And any time the film shifts focus to Eastwood’s Ranger and his crew, which includes Laura Dern, everything stops dead. These segments of the film are thoroughly predictable, littered with commonplace authority clashes and slowly-earned respect. A few attempts to forge a deeper connection between the two sides of the story by introducing the fact that Eastwood had a minor run-in with Costner during his juvenile delinquent days fall fitfully short. It comes across as little more than a token inclusion to give the Eastwood character some demons to wrestle with. Those misjudgments aren’t enough to diminish the impact of the relationship between Costner and Lowther, however. In the stretches featuring those two performers, “A Perfect World” approaches the level of the adjustive in its title. (3 stars.)