Get Shorty Instead
By Eric Cox

Be Cool   

Released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Rated PG-13 for violence, sensuality, and language including sexual references

 

On the heels of the Grammys and the Oscars comes this weekend's release of Be Cool, Hollywood's gentle ribbing of the recording industry in America--itself a sequel to 1995's Get Shorty, which was a Hollywood satire of itself.

 

Although some references to Get Shorty are made throughout Be Cool, having seen the original is not an advantage to keeping up with the plot of the rather convoluted follow-up.

 

John Travolta returns in the role of Chili Palmer, a former gangster who decided to become a movie producer in Get Shorty and has decided to get out of the movie business at the beginning of Be Cool.

 

In the film's opening scene, Chili takes a lunch meeting with an independent record producer, Tommy Athens (James Woods), who wants Chili to make a movie of his life.

 

When Chili excuses himself from their table, a Russian mafia hit man pulls up to the restaurant and shoots Athens dead.

 

Chili witnesses the shooting--which is played for laughs in the film, as are two other shooting deaths, the lethal beating of a man with a baseball bat, and the setting of a man on fire.

 

From the scene of the crime, Chili drives to a nightclub where he has a prearranged meeting with Linda Moon (Christina Milian), a singer whom Athens wanted to appear in his film.

 

Chili informs Linda of Athens's murder, and, having heard her perform, also takes a professional interest in her career. It occurs to him that maybe he ought to be in the music business.

 

A problem immediately presents itself: Linda is already under contract to a scummy producer, Nick Carr (Harvey Keitel). Chili tells Linda not to worry, and approaches Carr's right-hand man, Raji (Vince Vaughn), a white man who dresses like a pimp and affects the speech and mannerisms of a black rapper.

 

Raji is protected by a muscle-bound bodyguard, Elliot Wilhelm (The Rock), an aspiring actor who happens to be gay and is hypersensitive to being reminded of that fact.

 

The plot begins in earnest when Chili confronts Raji and informs him that he will be taking over management of Linda's career. This leads Raji to hire a hit man, Joe Loop (Robert Pastorelli), who, instead of killing Chili, mistakenly kills a Russian mafia hit man who was attempting to do the same thing (because Chili was a witness to Athens's murder).

 

Meanwhile, Chili introduces Linda to Athens's widow, Edie (Uma Thurman), who becomes her new producer.

 

Only one more problem: Edie's former husband owed money to a rap group managed by big-shot producer Sin LaSalle (Cedric the Entertainer), who intends to get his money back by any means necessary.

 

Chili must thus manage to avoid being killed by three different groups of thugs who, as this satirical film has it, are part and parcel of the modern music industry. At one point, Carr explicitly tells Chili that he might have been able to operate in the movie business by acting like a gangster, but those tactics won't work in the music business, because "we're all gangsters."

 

I have not read the Elmore Leonard novel on which Be Cool is based, but I'm sure there's a lot of funny stuff in it. There are plenty of well-drawn characters here, and the intricate plotting keeps the action moving. In addition, the movie's realistic violence would not be nearly as discomfiting on the printed page. For whatever the reason, however, the humor does not translate to the screen, and Be Cool certainly does not live up to the earlier adaptation of Leonard's Get Shorty.

 

With the exception of Vince Vaughn's comic creation, there is hardly a legitimate laugh in the first 30 minutes or so of the film. Travolta's character is so lifeless that he seems sometimes to be a robot. Even Cedric the Entertainer's role is more a dramatic than comic one.

 

What laughs there are come not from the dialogue or the types of witty scenes that populate Get Shorty, but from gags such as The Rock doing a flamboyantly gay stereotype, and a cameo appearance by Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler.

 

Satire is funniest when actors play their characters straight (no pun intended) rather than go for laughs. In that regard, the performances in Be Cool are very uneven, and the movie's tone suffers as a result.

 

If you haven't seen Get Shorty, rent it first. If you like it, don't bother seeing Be Cool.

 

Eric Cox is a research fellow at the Sagamore Institute for Policy Research (www.sipr.org) and a movie columnist for TAEmag.com.