Be Cool
 Rufus  rates it:    Community rates it:
   235 of 484 readers found this review helpful.

Get Shorty was a clever, straight-faced, well acted, and well written crime comedy. The bad guys were bad, and even the good guys were bad. The humor came out of pure character interaction.

I tend to watch movies like this, and rate them on a cool factor. What is the cool factor? Well, some characters are cool in a movie. Let me give you a short list of examples;

- George Clooney in Ocean's 11
- Burt Reynolds in Deliverence
- James Woods in Diggstown
- Steve McQueen in Bullitt, The Great Escape, or really anything that he was in.

Well, John Travolta had a high cool factor in Get Shorty.
Laid back, talked how it was, and could take care of trouble if it arose.

Sadly all the great things about Get Shorty did not transfer over to the sequel Be Cool.
The story is pretty much the same from Get Shorty, except Chilli Palmer is getting into the music business this time. He feels for a young woman that is singing in a bar, so he decides that he will be her manager. The previous managers do not like this of course. Oh yeah, also throw in the Russian Mob, and Cedric the Entertainer's gang. Why are they also here? Well, that is due to the paper thin plot, that just does not tie together.

Let me start with the good. Some references were made to the first one, which was nice. Remember the script that Hackman was directing? Mr Lovejoy is now on a billboard starring Tom Hanks. There also are some funny scenes between The Rock and Vince Vaughn. Cedric the Entertainer was also great in this.

Sounds good Rufus. Why the 2 cans? Well, because this is a sequel to Get Shorty. Slapstick need not be wanted, as the saying goes. While The Rock and Vaughn were humorous at parts, it did not fit in this movie. In fact everything was all over the board. One minute characters would be acting ridiculously over the top, then a glimmer of the first movie would try to slide in with serious adult humor. Sadly, none of it worked. Not one of the bad guys in this movie were intimidating either. Greasy Harvey Keitel, The Rock, Cedric or Vince Vaughn couldn't act normal. They were all over the top.

Another huge complaint that I have with this movie is with the constant filler. This is a pet peeve of mine. If you only have 30 minutes of actual acting, and plot then do not fill it with pointless stretches of nothing, so that the running time will be longer.

Please give us an example Rufus! Gladly.

The poor baptist singer gets a chance to play a song for Uma Thurman's character. Instead of just playing a quick montage of song, we get the whole song. That is 5 minutes that we streched this movie out longer.
Hey Black Eyed Peas are playing at a club! 5 more minutes while they play a full song.
Wow, the singer gets a chance to play along side Aerosmith!
How bout' a full song! Another 5 minutes.
I swear this movie was only 20 minutes long. The only reason it was a full length movie was due to all the damn music videos.
No wonder the plot made no sense.

Would I have rated this higher were it not a sequel? Sure. Unfortunately this is a sequel. I can honestly not recommend this movie to any fan of Get Shorty. If you've never seen that movie however, have fun. You may get a chuckle here or there.

A sad and dissapointed 2 cans out of 5.

Added:  Tuesday, July 19, 2005

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