Movie Review - BE COOL

I think I've been watching too many good films lately. I have limited time to watch movies, so I tend to be picky, currently focusing on my lifetime goal to own every film on IMDB's top 250 of all time. So when I got home from work at 1:30 yesterday and discovered my brother-in-law Kal-El was also done working, I said "Hey, let's go see a movie." After scanning the paper, I saw nothing playing that I thought would be very good. He said, "Let's see Be Cool." I said, "OK, I loved Get Shorty, and I heard Elmore Leonard wrote this also, so it can't be too bad." This is the guy that also wrote the novels that became Jackie Brown and Out of Sight. Now I realize why those films rocked and this one is turds. Leonard is a great novelist, but his films aren't taylor-made to be movies. The films mentioned above were all directed by great directors like Quentin Tarantino (btw, IMDB has the gayest headshot of Q.T. ever!) and Steven Soderburgh. Get Shorty was done by Barry Sonnenfeld, who no one would consider great but he's had more hits (Men In Black, Get Shorty, The Addams Family 1 and 2 and the underrated Big Trouble), then misses (Wild Wild West, Men in Black II).
USELESS TRIVIA ALERT!: After some research I discovered Sonnenfeld's route to directing was via cinematography and he's got some damn fine films on his cinematography resume (Raising Arizona, Big, When Harry Met Sally, and Misery).
Be Cool was done by F. Gary Gray who directed one of the all-time great comedies in Friday (but I attribute that to Ice Cube's script and Chris Tucker's performance). Since then Gray's resume has been mediocre(The Negotiator, A Man Apart and The Italian Job). He get's confused performances from everyone including good actors like John Travolta, Uma Thurman, and Harvey Keitel. And he tries to give major parts to musicians with varying degrees of success (Christina Milian gets a B, Andre 3000 gets a C, and ol' Steven Tyler gets a big fat D, and he plays himself!) He has horrible pacing in key scenes, when he cuts back and forth to close ups of whoever's talking. Hey Gary, try pulling back and let your stars (of which this movie is blessed with in abundance) act in a scene together in a wide shot. Sometimes there's so much time in between lines, it's like the actors are waiting for the camera to jump to the next shot before delivering their lines. The script is really weak and I don't know whether or not it's Leonard's fault or scriptwriter Peter Steinfeld who wrote another turd sequel called Analyze That. Let's blame Steinfeld. I almost couldn't sit through Chili Palmer (Travolta) telling Steven Tyler that Sweet Emotion was about his love for his kids. And when Tyler agrees with him and says "Mia and Liv?" (refering to his kids), I almost threw my popcorn at the screen. Sweet Emotion was recorded in 1975 on the album Toys in the Attic, and Mia wasn't born until 1978. Liv was born in 1977 but Steven didn't know she was his until the eighties! What kind of hack writing is this? It's also painful listening to Linda Moon's (Milian) cliched song about never giving up and achieving your dreams, while Palmer and Edie Athens (Uma Thurman) smile and bob their heads. Besides looking oh so hot in a bikini early in the movie and her dance number, Uma does NOTHING. The more clever aspects of the script are just ripped from Get Shorty, like the stupid hybrid car Chili has to rent (a mini-van in Shorty). The good lines from Shorty ("Look at Me" and "What are you gonna say?" "I'm not gonna say anymore then I have to" and "I'm the guy telling you the way it is.") are simply recycled and shamelessly repeated over and over here. I also hate how everytime Sin LaSalle (Cedric the Entertainer) walks into a room followed by his thug rap group (the Dub-MD's), every white guy in the room starts trying to act black and give him high fives and shit. And why'd they decided to shoot for a PG-13 rating. Leonard's dialog has a rythm too it and it contains plenty of F-bombs. It's one of the main reasons Get Shorty's dialog moves at such a good pace. There's guys killing other guys here, tons of rappers and gangsters and nobody drops an F-bomb. LAME WRITING!
While the movie as a whole has a stink all over it, there are a few redeeming aspects. The shear star power helps. Besides Travolta, Thurman, Keitel, Cedric, Milian, Tyler, and Andre 3000, you'll see Danny Devito (the only holdover from Shorty), James Woods (who is horrible and thankfully dies in the first 5 minutes), Vince Vaughn, and the Rock (Dwayne Johnson and he should go by Dwayne Johnson if he wants to be considered an actor. Cedric needs to drop that "the Entertainer" crap too when he's not doing stand-up). If you look quick you'll see cameos by Anna Nicole Smith, Kobe Bryant, Wyclef Jean, Gene Simmons and Fred Durst, not to mention performances by The Black Eyed Peas and Aerosmith. But the most entertaining parts are when Vaughn and the Rock are on screen. Vaughn plays Raji, a way WAY over the top wanna be black pimp, and the Rock is his homosexual wanna be actor turned bodygyard Elliot. They steal the movie with great performances in stereotypical roles, by breathing depth into them (Raji's tough act but total lack of self esteem, Eliot tries to act like a tough bodyguard but more overt homo behavior seeps into his character as the movie progresses). The Rock may really have some acting ability, folks. There are a few good musical performances, like the Blcak Eyed Peas playing to Travolta and Thurman's dance number, Aerosmith's duet with Milian on "Cryin'" and the final Linda Moon video song, which is catchy and should be a hit single for Milian. But these are just a few oasis of watchablility in the forced, unfunny turd of a desert that is Be Cool. Let someone else rent it and borrow it from them.

The Sneaky Cheetah's Grade: D