Be Cool

Review by Tim Basham

There’s a part in Be Cool where Danny DeVito’s character disparages John Travolta’s little hybrid rental car and asks him, "But what about speed?".

Travolta, as Chili Palmer, replies, "If you’re important, people will wait." Even in a not-quite-great-but-not-bad-either film like Be Cool — because it’s John Travolta, people will wait. And they will come.

Not unlike his character - reprised from 1995’s Get Shorty - Travolta epitomises cool. Men want to be him. Women want to marry him. And movie executives want him anyway they can get him.

Ex-shylock mobster Chili Palmer made a name for himself in “Get Shorty by becoming a player in the movie industry.

But in Be Cool he’s tired of movies. And when his friend Tommy, a record producer played by James Wood, is gunned down by the Russian Mafia, Chili decides the music business is where it’s at. From there it gets complicated, and funny.

Chili decides to manage the career of Linda Moon (Christina Milian) which angers Moon’s current manager Raji (Vince Vaughn [pictured with The Rock]) who complains to his partner Nick Carr (Harvey Keitel) who then has Raji hire a hit man (Robert Pastorelli) to bump off Chili. But the hit man accidentally shoots a Russian who was planning to kill Chili, so Raji comes down on the hit man for shooting the wrong guy.

Meanwhile, record producer Sin LaSalle (Cedric the Entertainer) tries to collect $300,000 from producer Edie Athens (Uma Thurman) whose husband was Tommy (the one murdered by the Russians) and because Chili has come to Edie’s aid, LaSalle puts the heat on Chili.

It all comes to a head when the Russians, LaSalle and his posse, and Raji pull out the guns at Nick’s office and LaSalle delivers one of the funniest monologues on the black man’s influence on American and world culture ever seen on the big screen.

Vaughn is at his funniest as Chili’s foil — a white man who thinks he’s a gangsta. As Raji’s gay bodyguard, The Rock sells it with a wide range of emotional outbursts and Andre 3000 is terrific as the bumbling sidekick to LaSalle. And Aerosmith rocker Steven Tyler does a nice job playing, well, himself.

With a plot this convoluted, and personalities this big, Be Cool comes very close to crumbling. But Travolta is the “cool” that keeps the film together - barely.

3 out of 5

Be Cool
Australian release: Thursday 10th of March, 2005
Cast: John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Vince Vaughn, Danny DeVito.
Director: F. Gary Gray.
Website: Click here.

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