Barely any of it is funny, and if a minute of it is meant in mockery, few of the darts ever find the board.
''Be Cool" is the sequel to Barry Sonnenfeld's 1995 ''Get Shorty," which was also a vehicle for John Travolta. The decade that's passed between the two movies feels like a lifetime, with each picture filling opposing seats on a career seesaw.
In ''Get Shorty," Travolta was at the height of his great comeback, untouchable and suavely comic. In reprising his role as the Brooklyn-raised loan shark turned Hollywood operator Chili Palmer, the actor returns to a more confident version of himself. The ham he's become of late is now a leaner, tanner, less laughable presence.
For a change, the problems with a lame John Travolta movie do not originate with Travolta. They're more the fault of Peter Steinfeld's watery adaptation and Gray's uncertain direction.
The film's plot picks up with Chili having hit it big as a Hollywood movie producer. When his garrulous record-business buddy Tommy (James Woods) is gunned down, Chili finds himself trying to simultaneously solve the case, rescue Tommy's production studio, woo Tommy's gorgeous wife Edie (Uma Thurman), a producer and former Aerosmith groupie, and launch the career of a pop singer named Linda Moon (Christina Milian) by attempting to buy her out of her contract to a dubious management company goon (Harvey Keitel).
Wait, there's more: racist Russian mobsters; that pimp (Vince Vaughn); his gay, aspiring-actor bodyguard (Dwayne ''The Rock" Johnson); those armed gangsta rappers; Debi Mazar as a cop with hair that begins as a pompadour and ends in a mullet; and the Wharton grad/remix producer (Cedric the Entertainer), who wants Edie to pay him money Tommy owed him.
They all have an eye on Chili, and in the novel the fight to get his attention made for a breezy good time. Here it's just desperate.
''Be Cool" so wants to be a collection of mini-showcases for actors such as the sporadically funny Vaughn and Johnson, who gamely toys with his image, playing the semi-manly sort of giant he made fun of back in his pro-wrestling days. Meanwhile, OutKast's Andre Benjamin plays one of the gangsta rappers, the one who's never shot a gun.
