Travolta Great but Nothing Cool About Shorty Sequel

Coming hot on the heels of Pulp Fiction, 1995’s Get Shorty was the beginning of an obscenely successful hot streak for star John Travolta. An actor synonymous with the word “comeback,” Travolta would follow his masterful portrayal of mafia-shylock-turned-movie-producer Chili Palmer with a string of hits some of which; Face/Off, Primary Colors, The Thin Red Line; border on being modern day classics of their respective genres.

That all changed with dawn of the new millennium, 2000 being the year Travolta’s re-found stardom snagged on his ever-growing ego. It was the dawn of the utterly misguided Battlefield Earth, brought to the screen by the actor seemingly by sheer force of wills, a vanity project to end all vanity projects. Unlike Mel Gibson, who recently did the exact same thing with The Passion of the Christ, Travolta’s labor-of-love was a colossal failure and one of the year’s biggest bombs. It also started him on a new downward spiral, catastrophes like Lucky Numbers, Basic and Domestic Disturbance calling the thespian’s hard-fought stardom into serious question.

Sure, there have been a few exceptions. Swordfish, The Punisher and Ladder 49 have all been moderately successful, each earning enough to rate as minor hits in the actor’s cannon. But Travolta didn’t star in any of them, each headlined by a younger actor (Hugh Jackman, Thomas Jane, Joaquin Phoenix) with the former Grease icon only there to add his support as either a smarmy heavy or a good-natured tutor. But his latest effort, the indie comedy/drama A Love Song for Bobby Long costarring Scarlett Johansson, was an outright disaster, studios now seriously questioning the actor’s credibility as a bankable above-the-title star.

So it is no surprise that Travolta returns to the screen as one of his most iconic characters, the aforementioned Chili Palmer, in Be Cool. And why not? The novel by Elmore Leonard is even better than the first so the source material is about as above reproach as the actor could possible get. Even better, he gets to re-team with Pulp Fiction costars Uma Thurman and Harvey Keitel, hopefully regenerating a smidgen of the magic the trio manufactured their last go-around.

Unfortunately, the creative team responsible for much of the first film’s success; director Barry Sonnenfeld, writer Scott Frank, actors Gene Hackman and Rene Russo; are nowhere to be found this time around. Instead, Drowning Mona and Analyze That! scribe Peter Steinfeld takes over adaptation duties while The Italian Job director F. Gary Gray grabs the reins behind the camera. It’s a step down, a big one, on both fronts and neither does the kind of job here that could be construed as anything remotely their best.

Not that Be Cool doesn’t have its moments; it does, and as a series of humorous vignettes and Hollywood in-jokes there is much to enjoy. The problem is, as a whole it just doesn’t gel, all the pieces never fitting together to become something completely, or for that matter even partially, entertaining. It’s too lumpy, too herky-jerky, and for a comedic motion picture trying to mine the Byzantine intricacies of the music business, and with a novel as brilliant as Leonard’s to crib from, this one has surprisingly little or unique to do or say.

Too bad, really, for there is much to enjoy about Be Cool. Set a few years after the events depicted in Get Shorty, Chili Palmer has become grossly disenchanted with the movie business and is considering heading back to Chicago. But when friend and music executive Tommy Athens (James Woods) is gunned down by a toupee-impaired Russian, Chili decides to sink his teeth into the recording industry because, obviously, that’s where the real action is. Even better, when he goes out and listens to Tommy’s sure-thing, pixie singing dynamo Linda Moon (Christina Milian), Palmer’s blown away and quickly takes the girl under his care in order to make her the star she longs to be.

One problem; she’s still under contract with record mogul Nick Carr (Keitel) and already has a manager, a lily-white jive-talking con man named Raji (Vince Vaughn) who’s under the mistaken impression he’s black. Backed up by a gay, wannabe actor named Elliot Wilhelm (The Rock) as his enforcer, Raji would rather just have Chili killed than try to negotiate with the former mobster, and seeing how the Russian mob is also keen on this maybe the lot of them can work something out to see it happens.

Add to the mix Tommy’s widow Edie (Thurman), straight-laced record producer (and clandestine gangster) Sin LaSalle (Cedric the Entertainer), Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and miss-hitting hitman Joe Loop (Robert Pastorelli in his final role) and things couldn’t get more crowded for Chili and Linda. No matter, Palmer’s having the time of his life, finding a spring to his step he hasn’t felt since first coming to L.A. and getting into the movie biz. No matter what they throw at him, Chili’s positive it’s all going to work out, especially if everyone can just, you know, be cool.

It should be pointed out right from the start that Travolta submerges back into Chili Palmer’s stylish shoes with graceful ease. He owns this character down to the very swagger in his step to each and every flick of his cigarette butt. It’s nice to see him having so much fun again, and that spirit of joyous enthusiasm Travolta puts on display is deliciously infectious.

But the movie does him a great disservice, not so much revolving around him or his exploits but upon each individual scene as they come up on the docket. Gray, who’s career is so hit (Set It Off, The Negotiator) or miss (Friday, A Man Apart) he might as well have his own dictionary entry for the term, hasn’t the first clue what he’s doing, directing and cobbling the film together as if on autopilot. The script is worse, however, Steinfeld mangling all of Leonard’s wickedly funny and intricately plotted prose, reducing it to nothing more than a Chili Palmer/John Travolta greatest hits collection. Fans of the first will know exactly what I mean, while fanatics infatuated with Pulp Fiction, Grease and other Travolta classics will simply just sit back and roll their eyes.

It’s a mess, and even if the actors all do their best (especially The Rock, who has never been this much fun or engaging, and Outkast’s André 3000, delightful as Sin’s inept right-hand man) it’s still wasn’t enough to get me to care. In the end, it all builds towards a hackneyed conclusion where the audience must believe without a doubt that Linda is just the kind of Diva and star Chili believes her to be. But Milian, for all her spunky charm and beguiling good looks, isn’t anything more than another Lindsey Lohan/Hilary Duff/Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera wannabe. She doesn’t have either the vocal prowess or the show-stopping prowess to command an audience’s attention and watching Aerosmith blow her off the stage is cringingly painful.

By the time it was over, all I could really do was start scratching my head. Anytime a sequel makes you question what it was you loved about the original it’s never a good sign, and that’s unfortunately what happens here. Unfortunately, the only thing cool about Be Cool are the performances, and even that’s not enough to make it worthwhile. I understand why Travolta wanted Chili Palmer to return; he needs a hit with his name above the title. This isn’t it, however, and the only good way to welcome this particular character back would be in a rerun.

Film Rating: êê  (out of 4)