CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale
LIKE a film by Quentin Tarantino, Get Shorty begins in a diner. And, like a Tarantino movie, it has lots of characters who go off on wild monologues about the weather and, specifically, about Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil: main guy John Travolta is an obsessive movie fan.
In Get Shorty, Tarantino meets ironic crime novelist Elmore Leonard (on whose book the film is based) and Robert Altman’s The Player. Travolta plays Chili Palmer, a Miami loanshark who is sent to Los Angeles to collect a gambling debt from trashy film producer Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman). Instead of breaking Harry’s legs, Chili pitches him a story for a movie, and before long he finds himself in the film business.
That’s all well and fine and it makes for an entertaining, joky movie about the inner workings of Hollywood — what a trashy, desperate world it is. The film contains loads of funky in-jokes about the industry, with self-absorbed actors like Martin Weir (Danny De Vito) and Z-grade producers like Hackman’s Zimm. And the performances are great. Travolta is as charming and sexy as ever, in his flabby, retro-chic way, and Hackman is marvellous.
But, somewhere between all this self-conscious movie stuff, with Travolta saying he’d like to be a Robert De Niro or an Al Pacino if he ever became a movie star, and Hackman forced to become a gangster himself to raise the money for his first A-movie, the film becomes boring. There’s not enough action, suspense or mystery to hold the parody together.
Director Barry Sonnenfeld, who started out as the dazzling cinematographer of the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and Miller’s Crossing, excels with flashy crane shots and joky production design. But the film as a whole is distinctly underwhelming — not thorough enough in its satire of Hollywood, and not gripping enough as a gangster movie. All in all, it’s a distinctly American in-joke.