Be Cool

Herald rating: ***

Twice, it was a surefire formula: John Travolta + suit + dance = cool. First in Saturday Night Fever, then when they added Uma Thurman to the equation in Pulp Fiction. Travolta and Thurman step out again in the big scene in this sequel to Get Shorty.

Travolta reprises Chili Palmer, the Miami loan shark who went to LA to chat to a movie-maker about the health of his investment portfolio and improbably ended up in the film industry.

This time around Chili has decided to quit the movies and move into the music biz. He has made this decision while doing lunch with a friend who owns an independent record label.

The friend is bumped off between courses. Chili not only sees a good business opportunity; he sees a couple of other opportunities, one being the newly widowed Edie (Thurman) and the other being an up-and-coming singer, Linda Moon (Christina Milian).

From Elmore Leonard's novel, the set-up is black, as always, and slick, as ever. From here, however, the movie becomes a series of cameos: Vince Vaughan as Raji, Moon's manager, who's under the illusion that he's a black rapper, The Rock as his gay bodyguard, Elliot Wilhelm, who has a Hollywood dream. Harvey Keitel as a music-biz goon. Andre 3000 of Outkast as a genuine gangsta rapper. Steven Tyler of Aerosmith as Steven Tyler of Aerosmith.

Trouble is, those cameos don't add up to much more than a series of in-jokes to the earlier movie and other pop-culture scenarios. Travolta will always be cool, but F. Gary Gray's Be Cool won't ever be.

The dance sequence is the centrepiece of two features on the DVD: a 20-minute feature records the day it was shot and a second spot in the Close Up section.

That area includes profiles of Cedric The Entertainer, Andre 3000 and Christina Milian. The Rock shows his moves in the recording studio, taking dance lessons and the full performance of You Ain't Woman Enough, which doesn't appear in the main feature. He and Vaughan get most space in 14 deleted scenes, there's a gag reel but no writer-director commentary.

* DVD, Video rental out now