Way too comfortable for its own good

The flick could have been more humorous.
By ROGER MOORE
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"Be Cool" ... is.
Cool. Almost too cool for its own good.
The "Get Shorty" sequel feels loose, casual, as jokey as the one-liners Chili Palmer (John Travolta) drops about the movie career he so wanted to have when he was but a mob collector (a "Shylock") in the first film.
"I never do sequels."
Yeah, he's rich and famous. He's done Charlie Rose. But Chili's losing interest, and has already lost his creative mojo.
He misses his old gig.
"At least they're honest about being dishonest."
But "Be Cool" takes the easy laughs. It's a comedy that sits a little too snugly in its own comfort zone. It gives us what we want and expect. It never dares to surprise.
Chili Palmer is ready for a fresh challenge when a pal in the even seamier music business is killed, leaving him a possible new star (Christina Milian) who needs only to break out of a suffocating contract, cut a record and win national exposure to become "the next big thing."
Enter the widowed record label owner (Uma Thurman). She helps work out the recording session and makes the connection to Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, who might help them out. Chili gives various managers, producers and others his "Look at me" speech. They're not as easily intimidated as the movie types, because a lot of them are ex-wiseguys, too.
Somehow, through all this, a star might be born.
The film of Elmore Leonard's follow-up novel shows Leonard and the filmmakers to be a lot more fascinated by the movie business than the music business. They don't try as hard.
Loathe for sequels
Travolta's performance was largely a matter of just showing up, something he was loathe to do for years because "I never do sequels." He wears the black suits, drives the oddball rent-a-car (a minivan last time, a hybrid this time). Of course, they find an excuse to put him together with his "Pulp Fiction" partner Thurman on the dance floor.
Forget all the add-on silliness with the other ex-mobsters who run the music business (Harvey Keitel), a hip-hop hit-maker who is not above having rivals shot (Cedric the Overexposed Entertainer), and a Jewish music mogul-wannabe who thinks he's got rap-speak and manners down cold (Vince Vaughan).
"Stop hatin', start participatin'. Come on, twinkle twinkle, baby, twinkle twinkle."
The heavies in the piece are those generic do-badders, "the Russian Mafia."
And federal agents want to know who all these people trying to kill Chili might be.
"I don't know. But I'm in the music business now. It could be anybody."
It's unchallenging but amusing enough. F. Gary Gray ("The Italian Job") is no Barry Sonnenfeld. But Sonnenfeld hasn't been as good as he was for Shorty.
The one novelty here is watching wrestler/action star The Rock try to play a gay bodyguard. Plainly the role scared him. He can't decide how far to go with the character -- Rock Hudson butch, or dial it up to full-tilt hairdresser stereotype.
He wants to be an actor.
"He does one eyebrow? That's it?"
Rock fans will get the joke. It's an eyebrow-arching performance with a little panic in it, always a good thing.
Nobody else was panicked, or even worried. Thurman isn't funny. Vaughan isn't as funny as he thinks. Cedric needs to take a little time off. At least Andre 3000, as an inept member of Cedric's posse, grows on you, and Milian is easy on the eyes and ears.
"Be Cool" doesn't ruin the memory of the dark farce that preceded it. But "Get Shorty" had a clear goal, and an industry worth lampooning. Maybe the music business is beyond satire at this point. And from the looks of "Be Cool," Travolta, at least, realized that going in.