Be Cool (2005)

Director: F. Gary Gray                                   Writer: Peter Steinfeld
Film Score: John Powell                                Cinematography: Jeffrey L. Kimball
Starring: John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Harvey Keitel and Christina Milian

At the beginning of the film Be Cool, movie producer John Travolta bemoans Hollywood’s insistence on sequels. “It was the only time I gave in in my life, but sometimes you gotta do it the studio way . . . I got hustled into doing a sequel.” Travolta should have read the screenplay closer because he go hustled into this picture, too. It’s absolutely terrible. There was no reason to make this film because the character of Chili Palmer had already made it in Hollywood. Where else was there to go? Get Shorty had been made over a decade earlier and it’s a terrific film. Based on an Elmore Leonard novel, it was funny in an intelligent way and was able to wring humor out of the characters because of their believability. Sure, they were exaggerated, but in a way that made sense within the structure of the film and the characters’ own motivations. This film, however, is like a Saturday Night Live skit. It’s juvenile, and you can almost see the pained expression on Travolta’s face the entire way through, as if he can’t believe he’s in such an incredibly bad film. The original was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who has a real feel for a certain kind of comedy, while the sequel was directed by F. Gary Gray, who is much better in serious films that have a small vein of humor running through them.

The film begins with Travolta wanting to get out of the movie business. When record producer James Woods is gunned down at a restaurant where they’re eating together, he begins thinking about getting into the music business. Woods had told him about a singer he wanted to sign, Christina Milian, and when Travolta goes to see her at a club singing seventies songs, he takes her away from her current manager, Vince Vaughn. Then he goes over to see Woods’ widow, Uma Thurman, and tries to shoehorn himself into her record label, but she doesn’t want any help. That is, until big-shot producer Cedric the Entertainer comes looking for his pay and Thurman can see in the books that the company is broke. Now Travolta begins working the principals against each other. These include Vaughn and Cedric as well as Vaughn’s bodyguard, Dwayne Johnson, a gay dandy who wants to be an actor, Vaughn’s partner Harvey Keitel, who is continuously on the phone, the police in the form of detectives Debi Mazar and Gregory Alan Williams, and a bunch of idiot Russians. Throw in a hit man who gets himself hit, the members of Aerosmith, and Cedric’s clichéd posse of rappers and the film rapidly turns into farce.

There are three major problems with the film. The first is the lack of quality production. Elmore Leonard may have participated on the screenplay, but it wasn’t his story. As a result, the script is little more than in-jokes referencing the first film and doing the same bits but with different actors. It also rehashes the same story arc but with music this time instead of film. And this leads to the second major problem. In the first film most of the actors spent time talking about the films they were going to make and the audience was able to suspend disbelief pretty easily because they obviously couldn’t read the scripts or see the films. But in a film about music the audience can hear Christina Milian sing and, as producer Paul Adelstein points out in the film, with shows like The Voice the audience has heard hundreds of girls who can do the same thing. So when everyone from Uma Thurman to Steven Tyler is gushing about how great she is--while we can hear she’s just like everyone else--it doesn’t work. The final misstep is that the movie is filled with stereotypes and over-exaggerated characterizations that are simply not funny unless you’re in grade school. And it’s pretty clear from the look on Travolta’s face that he knows it. I had high hopes going into this film because I had loved the first one so much. But Be Cool is a bad film that never should have been made, and if you value the memory of Elmore Leonard or Chili Palmer, you’ll run the other direction when you see it coming.