The casting choices say everything about What Just Happened? Here's a film that takes aim at big-money Hollywood superficiality, starring and co-produced by Robert De Niro and also featuring Bruce Willis and Sean Penn as themselves. While the film certainly has its strengths — a funny, smart script and a rare non-scenery-chewing performance by De Niro among them — any incisive observations on Tinseltown neo-aristocracy are immediately undercut by the fact that they're coming out of Robert Fucking De Niro's mouth. Needless to say, it feels somewhat disingenuous.
Of course, those same casting choices represent all of the film's cleverness as well. Willis and Penn play hilarious caricatures of themselves, riffing believably off of De Niro's surprisingly restrained portrayal of mega-producer Ben. A fictionalized version of writer and co-producer Art Linson’s life, the plot follows two harrowing weeks in Ben's life, and Linson manages to keep everything grounded by striking a balance between hard realism and you-can't-make-this-shit-up Hollywood zaniness (Ben must convince Bruce Willis to shave his beard off by the end of the week, or risk professional humiliation). Ben is the only sane person in a town full of maniacs, psychopaths and petulant children disguised as adults — it isn't the most original comic formula, but it works, for the most part.
There are films that pull off both comedy and drama in the same turn, but it's a difficult manoeuvre, and What Just Happened? doesn't quite pull it off. Ben's world is insane, but also weirdly flat and familiar. The characters are all detailed and complex, but some too-convenient coincidences make the drama in their relationships feel contrived. The argument could be made that the hollowness and artificiality is all part of a grander comment on Hollywood filmmaking, but that kind of comment is better suited to outsiders.
Still, even if it doesn't quite live up to other inside show-biz movies like The Player, What Just Happened? is a decently executed satire of a high-powered Hollywood lifestyle. Laughs and dry spots come in about equal measure, but it would be much easier to recommend if there was some kind of larger comment at work through it all. As it is, the film is unmistakably a product of the culture it's trying to criticize.
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