IRREVERENT Magazine - Movie Reviews

Being a creature of the VCR/DVD generation, I've never read an Elmore Leonard novel.  Not because I don't ever read anything, just because I don't tend to read things that get made into movies.  Generally I prefer to just wait for the movie itself and skip the 80,000 word lead-in, because once you translate into film it becomes its own entirely different experience.  So I can only imagine how disappointed Elmore Leonard readers are with Be Cool, especially since the author himself got an executive producer credit.

Be Cool picks up where Get Shorty (1995) left it 10 years ago: Chili Palmer (John Travolta), now a successful Hollywood producer, is bored with the system and looking for a change.  Luckily the brutal gangland murder of an acquaintance (James Woods) leads him into the music business, helped out by his remorseless widow Edie (Uma Thurman) who is now in charge of a bankrupt indie label as well as teasingly topless sunbathing.  The ever unflappable Chili stares down bad guys ("Look at me.  I said look at me."), cracks catch phrases ("Just as much as I have to, if that."), and lives in constant fear of his electricity bill as many of his major appliances are forever being used by the bad guys in his absence.  In fact, so long as every bad guy he encounters announces their presence by playing music or turning on his television, giving him ample time to prepare witty dialogue, Chili's your hero.  I suspect that if, instead of blurting out a monologue after a 10 minute warning, the bad guys just broke in and shot him in the head as he slept, Chili, a former mobster would be quite ruffled and surprised, and (thankfully for the audience) no longer able to look cool and dance with Uma Thurman.  Again.

Did I say "again"?  Early in the movie, Chili expresses how much he "hates sequels."  This I can understand, especially if he had just seen Be Cool.  For a movie that's trying so hard to be Get Shorty, without actually hiring the same director (Barry Sonnenfeld) and excluding Gene Hackman and Rene Russo -- who held the movie together when Chili wasn't busy being cool and staring down bad guys -- Be Cool falls far short of the mark.  The odd chemistry and quirky originality that made Shorty a rerun classic are all lacking the second time around, as is so often the case when The Machine^TM tries to bank on the success of a cinematic underdog.  It didn't work with Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000), absolutely not with Caddyshack II, and by the time Ripley was reincarnated they really needed to put a bullet in the brain of the Alien series.  Sometimes you just need to let go the desperate dream of stamping everything original, creative and spontaneous into a formula for printing money.  It just won't work.  Just imagine the horror of a Schindler's List II, or Open Water 3: The Leftovers.  Not everything deserves a sequel, not because it's so bad a movie, but because it's good just as it is.  Don't trash the memory by making something that looks like it but isn't.  Photocopies are never as good as the original.

This is not to say Be Cool doesn't have its moments.  Uma, as James Woods' widow Edie Athens is bright, funny, and cute as the would-be record producer who's just found a brilliant new talent in Linda Moon (Christina Milian).  And Milian, a real-world singer, can sing and sing well.  Then there's a host of supporting characters that do more than their share of holding up the story.  There's Nick Carr, a music-world bad guy performed wonderfully by Harvey Keitel, and a quirky performance by Vince Vaughn as the "wannabe black guy" Raji, not to mention The Rock as his gay actor chauffeur... who essentially reprises James Gandolfini's "Bear" from Get Shorty.  Last, but not least, there's also Cedric The Entertainer, who plays record producer Sin LaSalle, who does a fine job as a caricature gansta rapper. All in all, admirable performances but not enough to hold together the knock off story and overplayed gags.  By the time Uma and Travolta revisit their Pulp Fiction dance strangeness, if you weren't before, by now you're ready to call it quits.

The bottom line?  I have no doubt that Be Cool was a fine novel full of interesting characters and a lively plot.  It's just a shame that the film version spent so much time trying to recreate Get Shorty that it forgot about it.