Get Shorty (1995, R)

Directed by Barry Sonnenfield (Men In Black)

Written by Scott Frank (Out of Sight)

Starring John Travolta, Rene Russo, Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito, Dennis Farina

As Reviewed by James Brundage

In my line of work, the most fun you normally get is in the insult. The good reviews, on the average, are trite, fairly boring items. They say the same things, over and over, and rarely give you a chance to have a creative outlet. The bad reviews, on the other hand, allow you to have lots of fun. The real challenge of the job is to insult a movie in the most creative way possible, because, although insults run rampant in the world, very few of them actually take time to use any brainpower. They normally come in formats as cliched as some of the films I review, and are equally boring.

Sadly, I cannot exercise my creative skills at insulting Get Shorty. It was just too good of a movie to warrant that. The thing that is most fun about Get Shorty, however, is the way it insults the system of Hollywood. Watching a movie like that, I feel like the movies themselves are replacing my job: that maybe, maybe, Hollywood might start policing itself.

The movie is a surprisingly post-modern tale: a shylock trying to collect money from an idiot doing a scam on an airline ends up in LA and pitches a movie to another person he’s collecting from. What’s the pitch? A shylock is trying to collect money from an idiot doing a scam on an airline. By the end of Get Shorty, you swear you just saw a true story play out in front of you, but one that poetic license has made completely hilarious.

The movie opens with plot and conflict brewing. “Chili” Palmer (John Travolta) is having a conversation with a friend in Miami on the coldest day of the year… the temperature is a chilly 34. Palmer’s jacket is stolen by Ray “Bones” Balbone (Dennis Farina), and Chili quickly steals it back, breaking his nose in the process. Bones tries to kill Chili, but almost gets his hairline shot off instead.

Chili heads off to Las Vegas to collect a debt, then heads to LA in further pursuit, having picked up an additional debt on the way. In LA, he hooks up with B-movie producer Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman) and his scream-file-star girlfriend Karen (Rene Russo). All of a sudden, he decides he wants to produce a movie, that is, with the help of Zimm.

Only one problem: Zimm already owes money to another, LA, “Variety”-Reading, loan shark. One with seventy dollar a yard carpet, a stuntman for a hood, and an idiot for muscle. Meantime, he’s working on a drug deal with an idiot named YaYa who thinks that ten year olds in the airport are actually DEA agents guarding a bag full of $500,000. Not to mention Bones is hot on Chili’s trail trying to get even with Chili, and Chili is falling in love with Karen while trying to produce his first Hollywood feature film.

As normal, Elmore Leonard’s seemingly out of control story has a direction, a steady plot, and a nice, tidy ending. Everything comes together at the end, but it looks messy beforehand. In between, we’re granted a black satire of the Hollywood system where a loan shark decides to go into the movie business and seems to know more about it than a seasoned pro. Scott Frank does his normal great of capturing a novel so out of control and transferring it onto the screen without gift-wrapping it for us. So many of today’s adaptations are made nice and neat and ruined in the process.

Barry Sonnenfield does an especially good job: his camera follows Chili everywhere, and his use of the stedicam augments the fast storyline to make the film itself seem as fast-paced as a baby’s heartbeat.

Like I said, I like to insult. But I can’t do it with this film, this satire did it for me, taking on the Hollywood system and organized crime alike and still coming out very funny. Definitely see it.