John Travolta returns as former loanshark Chili Palmer in Be Cool, a sequel to Get Shorty - a film made a decade earlier. As with that earlier movie, this is an adaptation of a novel by Elmore Leonard but this is much less successful.
Time has passed and Chili has grown tired of the movie business and is wanting to work in the music industry. He has discovered a talented young female singer, Linda Moon, who he would like to work with but her contract is owned by a record label boss with a mobster background.
The film pits Chili against the label boss (played by Harvey Keitel) and against an array of other gangsters but never really engaged me. It never establishes a clear sense of threat and, more importantly, I do not buy Chili or Uma Thurman’s record producer as being huge music fans. The film certainly serves up plenty of references to musicians but the characters lack the passion of music lovers when talking about the business.
The film’s plot is also very slight, presenting Chili with remarkably few hoops for him to leap through. Instead much of the film is taken up with the various groupings of gangsters talking with each other about how Chili’s an upstart and how they should whack him.
Travolta gives a serviceable performance as Chili and he looks like he’s having fun but the character feels curiously uninvolved with everything else that happens. The film’s attempts to emulate the sexual tension of Pulp Fiction by bringing in Uma Thurman alongside him fall flat, with a tribute dance sequence proving neither funny nor sexy.
In support, Keitel and Vince Vaughn are both tiresome - particularly Vaughn whose white man who thinks he’s a hip hop artist shtick wears thin within seconds. Cedric the Entertainer is good value though and provides some of the few laughs of the picture.
The Rock also makes an appearance as a bodyguard who wants, badly, to be an actor. This character’s joke, boiled down, is that he’s gay and yet is in a brutal job - not exactly the stuff of great laughs and provokes a stream of homophobic gags. Somehow, despite this, The Rock comes off well in this role showing the enthusiasm and energy lacking everywhere else in this flick. His material is the weakest in the film but he commits absolutely to getting whatever laughs he can from it.
Be Cool is a mess of a film, missing its beats and lacking a focus. For too much of the film Chili is a bemused bystander and the film’s credibility as a satire of the music industry is repeatedly shown up. Since when would a duet at an Aerosmith gig ever launch a soul singer into the stratosphere?
Without reality satire falls flat and this film says nothing about the music business or its characters. Proving neither witty nor smart, Be Cool is a flop that wastes a strong cast and by trying too hard, proves to be much less cool than Get Shorty ever was.