Be Cool
(DIRECTED BY F. GARY GRAY; STARRING JOHN TRAVOLTA, UMA THURMAN; 2005)
John Travolta became a movie star by playing a Brooklyn kid who wins a dance contest in Saturday Night Fever (1977). He revived his career by dancing with Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction (1994). In Be Cool, Uma Thurman asks if he dances. “I’m from Brooklyn,” he says, and then they dance. So we get it: “Brooklyn” connects with Fever, Thurman connects with Pulp. That’s the easy part. The hard part is, what do we do with it?
Be Cool is a movie that knows it is a movie. It knows it is a sequel and contains disparaging references to sequels. All very cute at the screenplay stage, where everybody can sit around at story conferences and assume that a scene will work because the scene it refers to worked. But that’s the case only when the new scene is also good as itself, apart from what it refers to.
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction knew that Travolta won the disco contest in Saturday Night Fever. But Tarantino’s scene didn’t depend on that; it built from it. Travolta was graceful beyond compare in Fever, but in Pulp Fiction he’s dancing with a gangster’s girlfriend on orders from the gangster, and part of the point of the scene is that both Travolta and Thurman look like they’re dancing not out of joy, but out of duty. So we remember Fever and then we forget it, because the new scene is working on its own.
Now look at the dance scene in Be Cool. Travolta and Thurman dance in a perfectly competent way that is neither good nor bad. Emotionally they are neither happy nor sad. The scene is not necessary to the story. The filmmakers have put them on the dance floor without a safety net. And so we watch them dancing and we think, yeah, Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction, and when that thought has been exhausted, they’re still dancing.
The whole movie has the same problem. It is a sequel to Get Shorty (1995), which was based on a novel by Elmore Leonard just as this is based on a sequel to that novel. Travolta once again plays Chili Palmer, onetime Miami loan shark, who in the first novel traveled to Los Angeles to collect a debt from a movie producer and ended up pitching him on a movie based on the story of why he was in the producer’s living room in the middle of the night threatening his life.
This time Chili has moved into the music business, which is less convincing because, while Chili was plausibly a fan of the producer’s sleazy movies, he cannot be expected, ten years down the road, to know or care much about music. Funnier if he had advanced to the front ranks of movie producers and was making a movie with A-list stars when his past catches up with him.
Instead, he tries to take over the contract of a singer named Linda Moon (Christina Milian), whose agent (Vince Vaughn) acts as if he is black. He is not black, and that’s the joke, I guess. But where do you go with it? Maybe by sinking him so deeply into dialect that he cannot make himself understood, and has to write notes. Chili also ventures into the hip-hop culture; he runs up against a Suge Knight type named Sin LaSalle (Cedric the Entertainer), who has a bodyguard named Elliot Wilhelm, played by The Rock.
I pause here long enough to note that Elliot Wilhelm is the name of a friend of mine who runs the Detroit Film Theater, and that Elmore Leonard undoubtedly knows this because he also lives in Detroit. It’s the kind of in-joke that doesn’t hurt a movie unless you happen to know Elliot Wilhelm, in which case you can think of nothing else every second The Rock is on the screen.
The deal with The Rock’s character is that he is manifestly gay, although he doesn’t seem to realize it. He makes dire threats against Chili Palmer, who disarms him with flattery, telling him in the middle of a confrontation that he has all the right elements to be a movie star. Just as the sleazy producer in Get Shorty saved his own life by listening to Chili’s pitch, now Chili saves his life by pitching The Rock.
There are other casting decisions that are intended to be hilarious. Sin LaSalle has a chief of staff played by Andre 3000, who is a famous music type, although I did not know that and neither, in my opinion, would Chili. There is also a gag involving Steven Tyler turning up as himself.
Be Cool becomes a classic species of bore: a self-referential movie with no self to refer to. One character after another, one scene after another, one cute line of dialogue after another, refers to another movie, a similar character, a contrasting image or whatever. The movie is like a bureaucrat who keeps sending you to another office.
It doesn’t take the in-joke satire to an additional level that might skew it funny. To have The Rock play a gay narcissist is not funny because all we can think about is that The Rock is not a gay narcissist. But if they had cast someone who was also not The Rock, but someone removed from The Rock at right angles, like Steve Buscemi or John Malkovich, then that might have worked, and The Rock could have played another character at right angles to himself—for example, the character played here by Harvey Keitel as your basic Harvey Keitel character. Think what The Rock could do with a Harvey Keitel character.
In other words: (1) Come up with an actual story, and (2) if you must have satire and self-reference, rotate it 90 degrees off the horizontal instead of making it ground level. Also (3) go easy on the material that requires a familiarity with the earlier movie, as in the scenes with Danny DeVito, who can be the funniest man in a movie, but not when it has to be a movie other than the one he is appearing in.
Behind Enemy Lines
(DIRECTED BY JOHN MOORE; STARRING OWEN WILSON, GENE HACKMAN; 2001)
The premiere of Behind Enemy Lines was held aboard the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson. I wonder if it played as a comedy. Its hero is so reckless and its villains so incompetent that it’s a showdown between a man begging to be shot, and an enemy that can’t hit the side of a Bosnian barn. This is not the story of a fugitive trying to sneak through enemy terrain and be rescued but of a movie character magically transported from one photo opportunity to another.
Owen Wilson stars as Burnett, a hotshot Navy flier who “signed up to be a fighter pilot—not a cop on a beat no one cares about.” On a recon mission over Bosnia, he and his partner, Stackhouse (Gabriel Macht), venture off mission and get digital photos of a mass grave and illegal troop movements. It’s a Serbian operation in violation of a fresh peace treaty, and the Serbs fire two missiles to bring the plane down. The plane’s attempts to elude the missiles supply the movie’s high point.
The pilots eject. Stackhouse is found by Tracker (Vladimir Mashkov), who tells his commander, Lokar (Olek Krupa), to forget about a big pursuit and simply allow him to track Burnett. That sets up the cat-and-mouse game in which Burnett wanders through open fields, stands on the tops of ridges, and stupidly makes himself a target, while Tracker is caught in one of those nightmares where he runs and runs but just can’t seem to catch up.
Back on the USS Vinson, Admiral Reigart (Gene Hackman) is biting his lower lip. He wants to fly in and rescue Burnett, but is blocked by his NATO superior, Admiral Piquet (Joaquim de Almeida)—who is so devious he substitutes NATO troops for Americans in a phony rescue mission and calls them off just when Burnett is desperately waving from a pickup area. Admiral Piquet, who sounds French, is played by a Portuguese actor.