Beverly Hills Con

Chili Palmer is back- and shooting blanks in “Be Cool.”  (Film Review)

By Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: There are laughs…

The Downside: …but they’re as scattered as the moles in a whack-a-mole-game.

            In 1994 John Travolta danced… and it was good.

            In 2005 John Travolta dances again… and I dunno.  Maybe it’s the years playing on him, or maybe it’s that Be Cool isn’t half as chillin’ as its title suggests, but this time when he’s on the dance floor he doesn’t look like that guy from Saturday Night Fever, he doesn’t seem any more inspired or involved than a guy hawking vacuum cleaners.

            Honestly, I can’t really say this is Travolta’s fault, because Be Cool is so desperate to be all things to all people, including its own parody, it feels stuck in neutral.  When we see Travolta dance with Uma Thurman to the Black Eyed Peas’ “Sexy,” we’re acutely aware that we’re being handed this spectacle because the law of averages says that a good percentage of us saw Travolta and Thurman twist away in Pulp Fiction, so that alone establishes Be Cool’s street cred of being of movies rather than just about movies.

            At least, that’s how it seems to be in theory.  The reality is far different.

            The Travolta-Thurman dance sequence is only one reference in a movie that seems to run on them like an 18-wheeler runs on diesel.  Be Cool is the sequel to the1995 surprise hit Get Shorty, about a mobbed-up loan shark named Chili Palmer whose love of the movies and street smarts manages to land him in the role of a movie producer when he comes to L.A. to collect on a debt.  As Be Cool picks up, Chili’s last movie has tanked, leaving him adrift and considering getting back into the shylock business.  This is until a music producer friend gets whacked by the Russian Mob in front of a Santa Monica café.

            Get Shorty worked because it had perfect talent working on three fronts- Travolta seemed born to play the ultra-cool Palmer, Scott Frank’s script actually understood the idiosyncrasies of Elmore Leonard’s characters without simply copying them, and Sonnenfeld weaved everything together with his cartoonish, heightened-reality style.  I’m not quite sure what the game plan going into Be Cool was, or why Scott and Sonnenfeld didn’t return when they were such vital cogs to the success of the first film, but director F. Gary Gray (The Negotiator, The Italian Job) packs the opening 10 minutes with plenty of disparaging remarks about sequels and then turns much of the rest of the movie into kind of a replay-fest, recreating just about every good scene from Get Shorty without working up any of its own.  I’m not sure if this was supposed to play as an homage, a clever way to announce that it was aware of the niche it was in, or a way to cut critics, who love to talk about how crappy sequels are, off at the pass.

            All in all, I don’t know what anyone was trying to accomplish with Be Cool, which is part of the reason it is such a frustrating movie to watch.  It doesn’t even have the decency to be wholly bad- there were moments I laughed and there were moments I down-right howled.  But it isn’t consistent- these moments are set beside others that are plagued with this energy-sapping malaise.  Overall, it’s a bad sign when Chili Palmer of all people is the most boring character in your movie.  I can’t imagine if this was because Travolta was just coasting through the movie or if Gray boxed him into doing nothing but a recreation of Get Shorty, but either way most of the lulls strike when Travolta is on the screen.  Surprisingly, it’s the movie’s periphery that works the hardest (and I’m talking pretty damned hard) to keep it going. 

            Before getting the lead-salad-special, Chili’s friend points him to a singer named Linda Moon (Christina Milan) on the verge of a breakout.  The only problem is that she’s saddled with a manager (Vince Vaughn) whose idea of vision is a bargain-basement Spice Girls trio group belting out 70s classics.  Chili’s idea of contract renegotiation is to simply break the jaw of the manager’s gay bodyguard (The Rock) and get Linda signed on with the owner of a struggling record company (Thurman).  At this point, the Russian Mafia gets involved, as does a Suge Knight-ish rap mogul (Cedric the Entertainer) and his posse of gun-toting thugs who were probably the inspiration for a recent proposed bill here in Virginia to make the high-riding underwear look illegal.  It all sounds like the elements of an Elmore Leonard novel, but Leonard and even Scott have proven far better at keeping the balance sheet of so many characters straight than screenwriter Peter Steinfeld (Analyze That).

            Whatever little makes Be Cool work is due to the trinity that is Vaughn, the Rock, and Cedric.  Undoubtedly Vaughn gets the biggest laughs even if his character has been overused- the clueless white guy who likes to talk like he’s black.  It’s been done before, possibly even to death, but Vaughn’s damn-the-torpedoes, almost-improvisational madness makes it addictive.  The Rock gets a chance to laugh at his own persona (including his trademark eyebrow “thing”) while we get the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear him sing Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough.”  It’s funny how now burgeoning action stars eventually have to take the obligatory comedy role where their toughness is butt of the movie’s joke- and in that spirit it is ironic that Be Cool is opening the same week Vin Diesel has to change dirty diapers in The Pacifier.  Frankly, if I had to choose I’d wager that the Rock will end up a far bigger star than Diesel.  Simply acting yourself against the grain of a movie isn’t enough.  The Rock actually seems to get a kick out of occasionally mocking his own WWF image.  This leaves Cedric the Entertainer as the record producer who went to Wharton and belongs to the neighborhood watch but has no qualms with popping a mobster in the office of another record producer.  Cedric is a sight to see, but his role is so perfectly set in the contrast of the cutthroat rap music scene and his own tranquil domestic calm it’s hard to see how it could go wrong.

            What’s left of Be Cool is chaff- literally bland, tasteless fiber.  The story seems to have no structure- it just wanders dazed from one strange encounter to the next.  By the end when the turned-around claim ticket in a Russian pawnshop comes into play, I didn’t bother to use the brainpower to even try figuring who was screwing who.  It just didn’t seem worth the effort.

            It’s a shame- after the abysmal Wild, Wild West and the underrated Big Trouble Sonnenfeld really needed a movie to put him back on track and Be Cool could have been that movie- he simply has a gift for farcical comedy that Gray shows a lack of here.  There are moments of it that are funny- maybe even enough to make it worth seeing once, but a movie shouldn’t be like this.  Not this violently hit-and-miss, not so self-referential that it has no identity of its own.  There are plenty of people who try to save this movie, but I doubt even Chili Palmer is cool enough to get a handle on it.  And I don’t think all the dancing in the world will help.  C

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