Be Cool (2005) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

If you're like me, you thought Get Shorty was a pretty cool movie - not a world-beater, but an entertaining time-killer about an ultracool loan shark who decides to get into the movie business. If you agree with that assessment, you probably shared my anticipation for the sequel, Be Cool, which brought back John Travolta in one of his best roles as Chili Palmer, the cooler-than-cool mobster turned hipster.

Sorry. The idea was better than the execution. I found myself drifting off during parts of this film!

Nothin' agin' Travolta who not only has this role nailed, but also got his looks back and is capable of being a completely believable leading man again. The script just went in all the wrong directions. The author was not lacking in suitable clay to develop good ideas. Since Travolta decided to get into the music business, a lot of music superstars were on hand in both small roles and cameos. Christina Milian can totally sing, and also turned out to be an adequate actress for the ingenue role. Some of Chili's cool-ass banter was funny. There were some good minor characters as well: The Rock was on hand as the world's worst bodyguard, and he was damned funny; Vince Vaughn was on hand as the world's lightest-complected black pimp, and he too had some moments.

So what went wrong? There were two major problems:

1) Too many characters, too little time. There would have been more than enough plot with Chili taking on one or two different antagonists in the record business. The basic plot is that he's trying to muscle a talented entertainer away from Harvey Keitel, despite the fact that Harvey has an iron-clad contract. That plot alone would have permitted the development of six solid characters: one team would have consisted of Chili, Uma Thurman as the widowed inheritor of a debt-ridden studio, and the star singer (Christina Milian). The other team would have been Keitel, Vaughn, and The Rock. Given that basic structure with six characters, some of the promising cameos (Danny DeVito and James Woods, for example) could have been expanded. The screenwriter could have had a lot more fun with DeVito in particular. Unfortunately, the film added not one but two additional rival groups: a bunch of Russian mobsters and a bunch of gangsta rappers, both of whom felt that Uma's penniless studio owed them some big-time bucks. Acting outside any of these groups was a hit man who was hired by Keitel, but ended up as an independent agent being killed by Keitel's own men. That gave the film five different warring factions, all killing or trying to kill members of various other groups in complex permutations. For a while there the plot was getting so complicated that it made The Big Sleep seem as simple as The Odd Couple. There was just too much going on, and it was requiring too much mental energy for a film that I hoped to watch with my brain turned to the off position.

2) Chili is now too damned cuddly. The sequel to Pitch Black was done in when they made Riddick cuddly, and this film has some of that same vibe. In essence, Chili has gone from antihero to superhero, using his cool and persuasive powers to fight evil. This movie actually has a sappy ending in which the sweet, naive singer wins some awards under Chili's management, and she's just all gushy.

Bottom line: some good elements, but too long, too inconsistent, and too unfocused.