Be Cool

by Rick Curnutte

Richard A. Curnutte, Jr. is the Editor of The Film Journal. He has studied English and Film at Ohio University and The Ohio State University. He is a founding member of the Central Ohio Film Critics Association and a member of the Online Film Critics Society .

So far, Elmore Leonard's batting average has been pretty solid. I'm talking, of course, in Hollywood adaptations of his written work. Paul Schrader (Touch), Abel Ferrara (Cat Chaser), John Frankenheimer (52 Pick-Up), Jim McBride (Pronto), Martin Ritt (Hombre), Barry Sonnenfield (Get Shorty), Quentin Tarantino (Jackie Brown), George Armitage (The Big Bounce) and, best of all, Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight) have all brought, with varying degrees of success, Leonard's punchy, terse prose to life.

The streak ends with F. Gary Gray's insufferable Be Cool, a pointless exercise in genre mish-mash, a film that tries to be everything for anyone, when it should be one thing for everyone.

I'll grant that it's difficult to pull off Leonard successfully. Only Tarantino and Soderbergh have truly done it without flaws. But Gray (Friday, The Negotiator) and his screenwriter Peter Steinfeld (Drowning Mona, Analyze That) haven't even come close. I haven't read Leonard's follow-up to Get Shorty, but I'll wager it isn't steeped in the post-American Idol sanctimoniousness that this film is. It plays hero worship to rock icons Aerosmith and puts on a pedestal the kind of meager talent that is destroying contemporary pop music (the ideology that says as long as someone can sing on key, they can be a star). This film even goes so far as to suggest that Aerosmith's Steven Tyler would let an up-and-comer sing a duet with him based on one shaggy track played for him, get this, at an L.A. Lakers game. If Leonard wrote that, he deserves this film.

Much great talent is wasted here. I still think John Travolta is unnecessarily popular, a shapeless performer with very few tricks up his sleeve. Uma Thurman, fresh off revelatory work in the Kill Bill saga, is truly slumming here. Her eyes glaze over at this fawning new "talent", and there were many times where I was honestly embarrassed for her. James Woods, Harvey Keitel, Danny DeVito, Robert Pastorelli, Debi Mazar...all are wasted. Vince Vaughn, so interesting early in his career, is now nothing more than a gigantic clown, content to sail through mid-range studio films, collecting moderate paychecks.

The only people who seem to realize they are, in fact, in an Elmore Leonard film, are the three cast members with (other than Steven Tyler, whose acting merits no mention) the least experience: Cedric the Entertainer, Outkast's Andre Benjamin and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. All three are electric and punchy, just like Leonard's prose. They seem to be stuck in another movie, one that might have been fairly terrific.