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What’s cool about Be Cool, sequel of sorts to Barry Sonnenfeld’s very cool Get Shorty, the 1995 adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s black-comic crime novel? Not John Travolta returning as Chili Palmer, the mob "shylock" who decides to take up movie producing. Here he turns to popular music, a career move complicated when a pal (the long uncool James Woods) gets offed by the Russian mob. Although Travolta does take a graceful turn on the dance floor, he plays the role like a beef carcass sporting a black suit and a smirk. Neither is it the usually cool Uma Thurman; she plays the dead man’s widow and now sole owner of his independent record company (she wears T-shirts reading "mourning" and "widow," which is cool) who has an Aerosmith tattoo on her butt (Aerosmith is this film’s measure of cool) but comes off otherwise as a whiny and not bright basket case. The cool singer she and Chili are promoting (Christina Milian) is not cool; she has less pizzazz than Christine Aguilera doing a Pepsi ad. And F. Gary Gray’s direction, which shows no discrimination between utter crap and the occasional gem of coolness, is not cool.

So what is cool about Be Cool? Vince Vaughn is hilarious as a record executive with gangsta pretensions. The Rock is a hoot as a gay actor/bodyguard whose audition monologue is actually a dialogue from Bring It On. And Cedric the Entertainer is very cool as a rap producer who, when someone utters a racial insult, delivers an eloquent speech about the history of racism and the unacknowledged contribution of African-Americans to our culture and economy. Then he blows the guy’s toupee off with a jewel-encrusted revolver. In a movie as crassly exploitative as this one, such truths aren’t just cool, they’re cruel. (114 minutes)