Sequel attempt not so cool
Movie review
Liam Dynes
Issue date: 3/8/05 Section: Arts & Entertainment
The sequel is not unheard of outside of Hollywood, but let's just say that Hollywood has cornered the market.
Nowhere else really - argue that novels do the same, but I challenge you to see a similar scale - do we see glut churned out purely on the economic performance of its forbearer - witness the recent release of The Whole Ten Yards. I even enjoyed The Whole Nine Yards, or my personal favourite, the upcoming Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. To be fair, Be Cool is actually based on the follow-up novel to Get Shorty, where Charlotte's Web Two can make no such claim.
To be done well, largely pointless sequels should do a number of things: maintain and, if possible, increase the star power of the first movie, grow organically and logically out of the plot and characters of the first movie, and give us more of the intercharacter dynamic we loved so much from the original.
First, Travolta. The word alone should be enough to conjure up images of hammy overacting and flared polyester, but the man made an entertainingly cool Chili Palmer in Get Shorty. Unfortunately, the follow-up performance seems phoned in, so we have a little bit of a letdown to start off the star power category.
The deaths or writing out of heavyweight character actors' characters (Delroy Lindo, James Gandolfini, Dennis Farina) in the original calls for some reworking of the supporters in this pic, though thankfully Rene Russo is never even mentioned as a possible love interest. Uma Thurman may have seemed like a clever female lead in pitch sessions (Exec 1: "Hey, we can bring back Uma, and they can dance, and the Pulp Fiction crowd'll eat it with a spoon!" Exec 2: "I was just thinking that!") but she also comes off a bit flat.
Faring much better are the smaller supporting roles. Vince Vaughn is endlessly entertaining as a sniveling talent agent who is convinced he is black, complete with pimp jacket and awful street-slang accent. The Rock steals every scene he's in - especially difficult considering most are with Vaughn - as Vaughn's gay cowboy-actor wannabe bodyguard - his "monologue" of the titular scene between Kirsten Dunst and Gabrielle Union from Bring it On simply has to be seen to be believed. And André "3000" Benjamin makes a confident leap from rapper to big-screen, scoring big laughs as the inept henchman for the also enjoyable Cedric the Entertainer's Suge Knight-style music mogul. On a rapper-turned-actor scale of one to 10, Mos Def being the highest and Ja Rule being the lowest, André 3000 scores a solid seven, possibly even edging to an eight. Also popping up are James Woods, Debi Mazar and Seth Green, but blink and you'll miss 'em.
Nowhere else really - argue that novels do the same, but I challenge you to see a similar scale - do we see glut churned out purely on the economic performance of its forbearer - witness the recent release of The Whole Ten Yards. I even enjoyed The Whole Nine Yards, or my personal favourite, the upcoming Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. To be fair, Be Cool is actually based on the follow-up novel to Get Shorty, where Charlotte's Web Two can make no such claim.
To be done well, largely pointless sequels should do a number of things: maintain and, if possible, increase the star power of the first movie, grow organically and logically out of the plot and characters of the first movie, and give us more of the intercharacter dynamic we loved so much from the original.
First, Travolta. The word alone should be enough to conjure up images of hammy overacting and flared polyester, but the man made an entertainingly cool Chili Palmer in Get Shorty. Unfortunately, the follow-up performance seems phoned in, so we have a little bit of a letdown to start off the star power category.
The deaths or writing out of heavyweight character actors' characters (Delroy Lindo, James Gandolfini, Dennis Farina) in the original calls for some reworking of the supporters in this pic, though thankfully Rene Russo is never even mentioned as a possible love interest. Uma Thurman may have seemed like a clever female lead in pitch sessions (Exec 1: "Hey, we can bring back Uma, and they can dance, and the Pulp Fiction crowd'll eat it with a spoon!" Exec 2: "I was just thinking that!") but she also comes off a bit flat.
Faring much better are the smaller supporting roles. Vince Vaughn is endlessly entertaining as a sniveling talent agent who is convinced he is black, complete with pimp jacket and awful street-slang accent. The Rock steals every scene he's in - especially difficult considering most are with Vaughn - as Vaughn's gay cowboy-actor wannabe bodyguard - his "monologue" of the titular scene between Kirsten Dunst and Gabrielle Union from Bring it On simply has to be seen to be believed. And André "3000" Benjamin makes a confident leap from rapper to big-screen, scoring big laughs as the inept henchman for the also enjoyable Cedric the Entertainer's Suge Knight-style music mogul. On a rapper-turned-actor scale of one to 10, Mos Def being the highest and Ja Rule being the lowest, André 3000 scores a solid seven, possibly even edging to an eight. Also popping up are James Woods, Debi Mazar and Seth Green, but blink and you'll miss 'em.
