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Reel To Reel:
Be Cool

How It Rates: **
Starring: John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Cedric The Entertainer
Rated: PG-13
Red Flags: Violence, Language

Preconceived Notions: Another Elmore Leonard novel makes it to the projector -- and a sequel at that.
The Bottom Line: Be Cool? Be real.

Be Cool takes Chili Palmer (Travolta), the loan shark from Get Shorty who goes Hollywood, and turns him from movie-maker to record-maker. But with a film that should be a hit, it plays like a scratchy LP with dead spaces between tracks. Sure, there's bursts of electricity, hooks and choruses you can groove to but yet so much filler. You wish you could just download the good parts from iTunes.

The film opens with Chili's friend Tommy getting clipped by a Russian hoodlum with a toupee that could have come from Empire Carpet. Chili, conicidentally, wants out of the movie business, and lucky for him, Tommy tipped him off to a promising act before he bought the bullet. That leads him to Linda Moon (Christina Milian), a girl with an American Idol voice. One problem: she's under contract with sleazy manager Raji (Vince Vaughn), a white guy who thinks he's black. The Rock plays Raji's bodyguard, a would-be actor who can pass for black... and gay.

Chili starts making moves to get this girl to stardom, hooking up with Tommy's record company now run by his widow (Uma Thurman) while trying to dodge everybody who wants a piece of him, including the Russkies and a rap producer calling in a loan with his homies.

Elmore Leonard wrote Be Cool as a novel, but he didn't write the screenplay -- or direct it. It's a shame. Whereas Leonard writes crime novels that just happen to be funny, here's a crime comedy that happens to be overworked, as if the characters are trying with all their might to play things up for laughs. And how many times can I see John Travolta sitting in a chair with a cigarette and talk his way out of something? Wiseguy that he is, Chili seems a little too cool and one-dimentional.

Be Cool runs like a parody of an Elmore Leonard novel, a la Big Trouble. But the latter film was actually funny. This one is actually, well, not.