Be Cool

Be Cool (2005) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more.

Directed by F. Gary Gray. With John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Dwayne Johnson, Vince Vaughn. Disenchanted with the movie industry, Chili Palmer tries the music industry, meeting and romancing a widow of a music executive on the way.

John Travolta became a movie star by playing a Brooklyn kid who wins a dance contest in "Saturday Night Fever" (1977). He revived his career by dancing with Uma Thurman in "Pulp Fiction" (1994). In "Be Cool," Uma Thurman asks if he dances. "I'm from Brooklyn," he says, and then they dance. So we get it: "Brooklyn" connects with "Fever," Thurman connects with "Pulp." That's the easy part. The hard part is, what do we do with it?

Parents need to know that this movie has a lot of violence for a PG-13, though it's not very graphic. Characters are shot and beaten and some are killed. There is some strong language, including racial and anti-gay terms and a joke about how "f--k" can only be used once in a PG-13 movie, followed by its one use. Characters drink, and constant smoking is portrayed as cool. Many of the characters lie, cheat, steal, use force, and otherwise behave like lowlifes and crooks.

Underworld hipster Chili Palmer is back in the entertainment business in this sequel to the 1995 hit Get Shorty, which like the first film is based on a novel by Elmore Leonard. Gangster-turned-movie producer Chili (once again played by John Travolta) has grown tired of the screen trade, especially after his latest project turned out to be a box-office flop. Chili is looking for new horizons and thinks he may have found his niche when his close friend Tommy Athens (James Woods), a fellow mobster who runs an independent record label, is murdered by Russian gangsters. Chili takes over Athens' record company, Nothing to Lose Records, and begins courting Tommy's girlfriend, Edie (Uma Thurman). Edie is an experienced hand in record production, and together she and Chili spot what would seem to be the ideal act for their label -- Linda Moon (Christina Milian), a beautiful young woman with a powerhouse voice. Linda is stuck, however, in a going-nowhere R&B trio managed by the monumentally sleazy Raji (Vince Vaughn). Chili isn't much concerned about Linda's contract with Raji, but Raji certainly is, and the manager soon takes out a contract on Chili with the same Russian hoods who killed Tommy. Soon Chili is facing all the action he can handle between the Russian gunmen, a music mogul named Nick Carr (Harvey Keitel) who wants Chili to stay out of the business, and Sin LaSalle (Cedric the Entertainer), a successful hip-hop producer who wants Chili to pay him the 300,000 dollars he is owed by Tommy. Be Cool also features appearances by The Rock as a gay Samoan bodyguard, Andre Benjamin (aka Andre 3000 from the hip-hop duo Outkast) as a rapper who isn't very good with a gun, and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler as himself.

A decade later, John Travolta returns as former mob collector Chili Palmer in this tepid, trashy sequel to 'Get Shorty.'

What the hell happened? John Travolta was a live wire as Chili Palmer in Get Shorty, the hit 1995 film version of Elmore Leonard's novel about a Miami loan shark who links up with sharks of the Hollywood variety and fits right in. In Be Cool, based on Leonard's novel about Chili making moves on the music industry, Travolta looks zombified, as if all the comic energy had seeped out of his performance. He's not alone. Uma Thurman plays Edie, Chili's partner in a deal to produce a CD for a new singer (a wasted Christina Milian), and it's dispiriting to watch her and Travolta struggle vainly to reproduce their Pulp Fiction heat on the dance floor. The toothless satire in the script by Peter Steinfeld strands good actors, including Harvey Keitel, James Woods and Cedric the Entertainer. Vince Vaughn gets a few laughs as Raji, a walking sight gag as a bling-covered white dude aching to be black. But the Rock, as a gay bodyguard with acting ambitions, quickly wears out his queer-eyebrow routine. As for director F. Gary Gray, in for inspired Get Shorty director Barry Sonnenfeld, the only knack he shows is for turning Leonard's authentic take on the music world into synthetic pap. You know a sequel isn't working when, ten minutes into the movie, a voice inside your head ts screaming, "Please make it stop!"

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Be Cool is a 2005 American crime-comedy film adapted from Elmore Leonard's 1999 novel of the same name and the sequel to Leonard's 1990 novel Get Shorty (itself adapted into a 1995 film of the same name) about mobster Chili Palmer's entrance into the music industry.