Review
BE COOL
Starring John Travolta, Uma Thurman and Vince Vaughn
Directed by F. Gary Gray
Opens Friday, March 4
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A tepid and timid followup to 1995’s snappy Get Shorty, Be Cool is cool like John Travolta is cool or Danny DeVito cameos are cool or Aerosmith circa 2005 is cool or Carrot Top references are cool or jokes about gay men who like shiny boots are cool – which is to say not in the slightest bit cool.
In fact, it’s so far from cool, it costs $3 a minute to phone cool from where it’s at. And no matter what it tries to tell you, Be Cool has never shot the shit with cool until 4 a.m. at the Viper Room, which, to judge from its appearance in Be Cool, is now about as cool as the Olive Garden. But that’s still cooler than this.
Travolta returns as Chili Palmer, the former Miami shylock who finagled his way into a Hollywood movie deal in Get Shorty. After an experience with a cruddy sequel sours him on the film business, fortune beckons in the forms of an allegedly talented singer (Christina Milian) and a foxy record company owner (Uma Thurman). Yet the intimidation tactics that allowed Chili to put one over on the movie types may not fly with his rougher rivals, a motley crew that includes gun-toting gangstas, Russian heavies and an over-excitable white homie played by Vince Vaughn. As one nemesis tells Chili, "This is the music biz – we’re all wiseguys."
An Elmore Leonard novel is again the source and while that was good news in the cases of two movies made possible by Get Shorty’s success – Out of Sight and Jackie Brown – Be Cool is far from the crime master’s best. Where Get Shorty made the most of its movie-biz milieu, Be Cool’s stabs at satirizing the music world are silly, obvious and fatally unhip. Leonard had an excuse for not getting a handle on hip-hop culture – the man’s over 70. No such charity can be granted to anyone involved in the movie, especially given its casual ridicule of blacks, gays, Asians, Russians and, in a novel twist, Samoans.
The lack of heat between Pulp Fiction co-stars Travolta and Thurman is another mystery, as are the careless plotting, the slack pacing and any line reading by a decrepit member of Aerosmith. Yet Be Cool does boast one happy surprise: OutKast’s Andre 3000 is a natural-born movie star. Even when saddled with the tired role of a trigger-happy rapper, he displays a light comic finesse that’s largely absent from the rest of this smug endeavour. Now that cat knows cool. |
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