My World of Flops, I Hate Sequels Case File #199/The Travolta/Cage Project #79 Be Cool (2005)
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I’ve written extensively about a phenomenon I have coined The Lisa’s Sexy Red Dress Effect after The Room’s desperate need to continually establish, through dialogue, just how inconceivably, mind-bogglingly sexy femme fatale Lisa is in her sexy little red dress.
In a Dissolve Forgotbuster entry on The Secret of My Success I wrote of Lisa’s Sexy Red Dress Effect, “The more attractive characters are, the less screenplays need to assert their attractiveness. Conversely, the less attractive characters are, physically or otherwise, the more screenplays need to assert their attractiveness. And the more desperately a screenplay asserts someone’s appeal, the more glaring and conspicuous that character’s failings become. This in turn increases the likelihood that audiences will rebel against this attempt at forced indoctrination and ascertain that not only are said characters not the living embodiment of luscious sexuality, they aren’t even particularly attractive to begin with.”
F. Gary Gray’s appalling 2005 Get Shorty sequel Be Cool features one of the purest and most unfortunate examples of the Lisa’s Sexy Red Dress Effect this side of Sarah Paulson’s Harriet Hayes on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
Only instead of beating audience’s over the head with Lisa’s sexiness or the literally unbelievable talent of Harriet Hayes, Be Cool devotes way too much of its impossibly bloated two hour runtime to characters gushing effusively about the God-like genius of Christina Millian’s Linda Moon.
It’s not enough for us to be impressed by Moon, to think that she’s talented and beautiful and destined for big things. No, Be Cool angrily insists that we be blown away by Moon, that we see her as the second coming of Aretha Franklin but with a hip rock and roll edge.
I was CRYING when I saw Steven!
How hip and how rock and roll? Well, Moon does more or less hold her own singing a duet with 2005-era Aerosmith, whose frontman, needless to say, has very nice things to say about Moon, and Be Cool is so lame that it thinks that 2005 era Steven Tyler is very hip and very rock and roll and not an irrelevant, embarrassing dinosaur.
There’s a damn good reason why Milian has enjoyed only moderate success as a singer and an actress. It’s because she is a moderately talented singer and actress. She’s certainly not untalented but she most assuredly lacks the explosive charisma and jaw-dropping talent Be Cool needs her to possess.
Be Cool needs Milian to be Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born or Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls; a volcanic musical force so undeniable that it would be an unforgivable crime for her not to ascend to the rarified heights of superstardom.
Instead Milian comes off as a slick mediocrity. She’s a beautiful woman with a perfectly serviceable voice but the pop music realm is chockablock with beautiful women with decent voices. You need some special, ineffable magic to rocket to mega-stardom and Be Cool betrays that Milian fatally lacks that magic.
Milian’s theoretically explosive, undeniable talent is the engine that drives Be Cool’s plot. So it is perhaps unsurprising that Be Cool sputters along incompetently for two shapeless, meandering hours before lurching mercifully to a close.
Be Cool opens with John Travolta’s Shylock turned Film Producer Chili Palmer grousing, “I hate sequels” to degenerate independent label owner Tommy Athens (real-life lowlife James Woods). It’s an all too appropriate opening for an insultingly lazy, obvious follow-up that simultaneously tries way too hard to recreate the alchemy of Get Shorty and doesn’t try at all.
Tommy is killed, leaving wife Edie (Uma Thurman) a widow deeply in debt to Sin LaSalle (Cedric the Entertainer), a Suge Knight-like gangsta rap mogul but with an Ivy League pedigree.
Then Chili discovers Linda Moon wasting her God-like gifts in a dreadful girl group that pairs her with Miss Bangkok, a crude, moderately racist caricature of an Asian ditz who communicates, just barely, through a combination of broken English and Ebonics.
Chili instantly decides to give up the movie business in order to realize his sacred destiny bringing quite possibly the greatest entertainer in the history of the universe to the attention of a world in desperate need of her unprecedented gifts.
But first Chili has to get his thankful new protege out of an exploitative deal with would-be star-makers Roger "Raji" Lowenthal (Vince Vaughn) and Nickie Carr (Harvey Keitel).
Raji dresses like a pimp from a 1975 blaxploitation movie, talks like a hustler from a 1985 Cannon b-movie and inhabits a world clearly modeled after 1995-era Death Row Records. It’s a performance out of time that we’ve seen countless times before: the white guy who talks and dresses in a cartoonish approximation of black street slang.
Gray did not direct Vaughn so much as he indulged his every manic ad-lib and amped-up improvisation. In The Joy of Trash I write about how the exhausted and exhausting comedy of foolish white people talking and acting black represents racism once removed, since it’s not too much of a jump to go from thinking that it’s innately comic and ridiculous when white people try to co-opt black street culture to thinking black street culture is itself innately comic and ridiculous.
Cedric the Entertainer has a nice moment where he responds to a racial slur by articulating the central role black people have played in defining and refining American pop culture and culture in general.
But the moment rings hollow and disingenuous, not to mention hypocritical, since the film’s own take on the Hip Hop industry and black culture is so stereotypical, reductive and overly familiar.
Gray and screenwriter Peter Steinfeld clearly did not take Sin’s words about the power and importance of black culture to heart when they surrounded him with glowering, muscle-bound, gun-toting, largely silent gangstas as well as Dabu (Andre Benjamin), a trigger happy half-wit perpetually frustrated that he doesn’t get to kill people.
Raji is protected, after a fashion, by protege and bodyguard Elliot Wilhelm (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), a guileless child in a man’s outsized body who lives to entertain despite being almost impressively talentless as an actor and a singer.
Elliot is also gay and since Be Cool was released in 2005 that means that his sexuality is mockingly referenced in damn near every scene he appears in. Of the film’s performers, Johnson alone seems to grasp the tone the film should be going for: winking, lightweight goofiness with an undercurrent of genuine sweetness.
The scene where Elliot tries to impress Chili by performing a “monologue” from Bring it On that involves playing multiple characters is an oasis of hilarity in an otherwise laugh-free desert of strained humor and DOA wackiness.
The pairing of Travolta and Thurman affords Be Cool an opportunity to soil not one but two of Travolta’s greatest mid-period triumphs. Be Cool is an insult to Get Shorty but it’s even more disrespectful to Pulp Fiction.
That Be Cool has the stars of one of the most iconic films of all time limply recreate their famous dance to the music of special guests the Black Eyed Peas says everything about the film and its abysmal taste and judgment.
From Chuck Berry to Will.I.Am and Fergie is one hell of a downgrade. Get Shorty understands that nothing is less cool than trying to be cool whereas Be Cool tries to be cool for two interminable hours and succeeds only in being egregiously un-hip.
In Get Shorty Travolta was a master of minimalism, a deadpan delight who didn’t have to raise his voice or stand up to be intimidating. Travolta sinks to the level of the material here, sleepwalking through a role that’s never a fraction as badass or irresistible or fun as it’s supposed to be.
In the single worst scene in a movie in which Harvey Keitel briefly raps, Chili seduces Steven Tyler into giving his protege a chance to perform live with Aerosmith by asking him what he was thinking about when he wrote “Sweet Emotion.” The answer is probably heroin or some other hard drug but a visibly uncomfortable Tyler instead awkwardly jibber-jabbers some nonsense about rocking and rolling and whatnot and Chili corrects him by telling him that what he was really feeling was the sweet emotion of being the father of two young daughters, one of whom he would go on to disturbingly sexualize in a series of iconic music videos, when he wrote the song. Tyler lights up at the deeply flattering “revelation”, as blown away by Chili’s insight as he is the knockout pipes and dynamite curves of the sexy and talented Linda Moon.
I’m not sure where a scene this maudlin and embarrassingly maudlin belongs, beyond Chicken Soup for the Boomer Rocker Soul but it sure as shit doesn’t belong in a sequel to Get Shorty with aspirations to hipness and satire.
Between Staying Alive, Look Who’s Talking Too, Look Who’s Talking Now and Be Cool, Travolta has had terrible luck with sequels that insult rather than complement their predecessors.
Be Cool opens with Chili saying he hates sequels and then proceeds to illustrate why he’s 100 percent correct, at least where this dog of a follow-up is concerned.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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