REVIEWED - BE COOLEdie Athens, a music producer played with scant enthusiasm by a waxy Uma Thurman, has just lost her husband in a gangland slaying. In the weeks following the tragedy, as this lumbering sequel to Get Shorty hungrily eats away at the thin tendrils connecting its divergent plotlines, Edie steps out in a series of black T-shirts bearing legends such as "Mourning" and "Widow".
This, you might think, constitutes a satisfying dig at the glib fatuousness of the walnut-brained poltroons who run the music business. Not a bit of it. Whereas Get Shorty appeared to be mildly revolted by the doings of Hollywood, Be Cool, in which John Travolta's Chili Palmer develops an interest in pop promotion, goes out of its way to revel in the moronic excesses of today's Tin Pan Alley.
There are monsters about: Harvey Keitel's rapacious label owner, Cedric the Entertainer's violent hip-hop producer. But Edie is clearly supposed to represent integrity (albeit integrity of a kooky hue). Director F Gary Gray and his team may, one fears, see those T-shirts as the height of cool.
Adapted, as was the earlier film, from a novel by Elmore Leonard, whose dialogue-rich, character-driven stories rarely sit comfortably on screen, Be Cool meshes together eight or nine only vaguely connected ideas for a movie, all of them bad. Palmer, once a loan shark, now a successful film producer, happens upon a talented soul singer (Christina Milian, actually as bland as Ready Brek) in LA's Viper Room and, undeterred by the news that she has a contract with Keitel's label, decides to become her manager. Edie will be the producer.
Along the way to a pounding musical finale we encounter the following: a violent phalanx of Russian mafiosi; an Italian-American hitman who eats while he talks; gangsta rappers who aren't as tough as they pretend; and Vince Vaughn's unwelcome disinterment of that Neo-Pleistocene routine wherein a white guy acts black.
To say that The Rock's turn as a gay bodyguard is the best thing in the film is to proffer fainter praise than the former wrestler deserves. Retaining one's dignity in such a role in such a film is a genuinely heroic achievement.
The director, who certainly doesn't stint in his efforts at polishing this garbage, layers the story with innumerable nudge-nudge references to the picture's own obviousness. Virtually the first words out of Travolta's mouth are "Eugh, sequels!"
Such self-conscious whistling in the dark is, however, only a mild annoyance when compared with the fawning reception the film accords various leathery members of Aerosmith, who turn up to play an awful mid-tempo ballad and have Uma scatter rose petals at their feet. Not since bits of Duran Duran appeared on Miami Vice have pop singers looked so ridiculous.
