Deja vu… I feel like I saw this movie ten years ago. It was about a wise guy shilock who gets into a new business and runs afoul of wannabe and big-tim organized crime groups.
YEESH! This movie was a stinker. I LOVED Get Shorty. Top ten all-time favorites. It was so hip. So smart. Played perfectly.
This movie had no point. There were even identical scenes from the first film (Uma and Chilli in waking up in bed. Impressing Martin Weir with a car. Some one ratting out Chilli to a gangster on the phone.)
And some of the new characters were just stand ins for those from the first film: The Rock was the new “Bear”, Vaughn was “Ronny” and Keitel was sort of Delroy Lindo’s character (though Vaughn played part of that as well). Cedric was so good, he took two parts; part Ray Barbones, part Columbian Drug Lord.
My wife and I started laughing about the duplications after a while. It would be a great drinking game to take a drink every time this film so obviously aped the first.
Should this screenwriter have gotten credit for “writing” this film? He just spliced a little Yo MTV Raps into the script of Get Shorty!
Unfortunately, there was something interesting that went to waste. Wouldn’t you have LOVED to see a non-Get Shorty movie that focused on Cedric the Entertainer’s posse in a contract war with Keitel, Vaughn and the Rock? Chilli Palmer’s presence in the film was unneccessay.
This sequel was the most contrived, derivative spinoff I have ever seen. Definitely the biggest drop in quality between a film and its successor (in part because the first was so good).
The only things that kept the film from getting the dreaded one star on my Netflix rating were the performances of Cedric the Entertainer (and his sidekick who I think to be Andre 3000) and the Rock. Big Bad Voodoo Lou has always said to me that the Rock had the chops. I sort of agreed, but this performance made me a fan. He is a solid actor. And Cedric stole the show (though the show was not a sellout…)
Overall, if you have two hours, just pop in the original. You’ll get largely the same picture, but it won’t be blurry; as carbon copies tend to be…