One of the Five Worst Films of 2005 - and it's only March!

With films like The Negotiator and Set It Off, F. Gary Gray showed a knack for staging action sequences and building suspense. Why that makes him an ideal choice to direct the Get Shorty sequel Be Cool is difficult to figure. The books of Elmore Leonard have almost always been more about the characters than about the plot - although the plots always offer a strong narrative drive. The best Leonard adaptations (Jackie Brown, Out of Sight, and Get Shorty) struck the correct balance between people and events. Gray loses the tone of Be Cool (which to be fair is one of Leonard's least interesting books) in less than twenty minutes. His editing is crisp in spots, but often he lets the scenes linger on longer than they need to, especially when the actors appear to be improvising. Since they rarely say anything revealing, funny, or even amusing these moments grind the film to a halt. What really sinks the film, however, is John Travolta giving arguably the laziest performance of his career. The ten years between Get Shorty and Be Cool (a decade that saw him take millions and millions of dollars for such drivel as Basic, The General's Daughter, The Punisher, and Domestic Disturbance) have taken much of the "cool" off of Travolta. In Get Shorty Chili Palmer seemed like the smartest guy in the room, a man constantly feeling out the angles of the people he was manipulating. In Be Cool Chili seems like he knows all the angles because Travolta, who comes off smug and/or tired much of the time, has read the script. While none of the supporting actors embarrass themselves, none of them have anything all that interesting to do and each must contend with the black hole that is Travolta's performance sucking what little life there is clean out of the movie. Just because it is a cliché to say that John Travolta has had more career comebacks than just about any actor in history does not make it any less true. After the dead-end that is Be Cool, it would seem that Travolta should begin looking in earnest for his next Quentin Tarantino or at least his next talking baby.