Be Cool thinks it's cool to point out its own shortcomings, as if acknowledging them somehow forgives them, but I don't really think it works that way.

The movie, based on author Elmore Leonard's sequel to the novel that inspired 1995's Get Shorty, opens as movie producer Chili Palmer (John Travolta) and Tommy Athens (James Woods), another felon-turned-Hollywood big shot, chat about the artistic failures of Get Lost, the sequel to the fictional movie Chili produced in Get Shorty.

Chili laments that you can only say the f-word once in a PG-13 movie (like Get Lost and Be Cool) and then immediately says it ... ha ha. Of course what the PG-13 rating really means nowadays is that it's a film marketed to high school kids, and not at the same crowd that enjoyed Get Shorty so much nearly ten years ago.

After Athens gets shot abruptly by a Russian mafia man with an errant toupee, Chili shifts his sights from movies to the record company Athens left behind, now run by his widow Edie (Uma Thurman), whom Chili quickly begins to court.

Chili's first prospect as a record industry bigwig is to sign Linda Moon (Christina Milian), a perky, young singer-songwriter seemingly trapped under a contract with a '70s nostalgia girl band that is well beneath her talents.

But first Chili will have to get by Raji and Nick, her sleazy managers, played by Vince Vaughn and Harvey Keitel, respectively.

To make matters worse, Chili's new record company owes 300 grand to Sin La Salle (Cedric the Entertainer), a rap producer who travels with an entourage of husky, pistol-packing gangsta rappers.

In order to get his new company out of debt, Chili hatches a plan to make Linda a big star by getting her to sing with Aerosmith, for whom Edie used to be a roadie. Enter Steven Tyler, who tells Chili that he doesn't want to be one of those singers that appears in movies ... ha ha. But judging from his vapid, humorless self-portrayal that instinct was probably a good one.

That's about when the movie stops for a few minutes so that John and Uma can dance to the Black Eyed Peas in a sequence captured without a hint of the pizzazz of the duo's famous Pulp Fiction twist, but then it's hard to recreate chemistry when two characters are drawn to each other by nothing more than convenience to the plot.

Then, a little while later the movie stops again, this time so we can watch Linda sing "Cryin'" at a real live Aerosmith concert. What an uninterrupted five-minute rock concert excerpt is doing in a black comedy/crime caper was a mystery to me until I realized that Aerosmith, whose current label is Columbia Records, and Be Cool, produced and distributed by MGM, share the same corporate owner: our good friends at Sony, who can always be counted on for shameless cross-promotional advertising.

"I had to get out of the movie business," Chili says earlier, "because it's gone too corporate," ... ha ha.

The film's failings are certainly not the fault of the cast, most of whom come with their respective A-games. André 3000 in particular is quite hilarious as lanky foul-up gangsta Dabu and manages to steal just about every scene he's in.

Dré, Cedric, Vaughn, and even The Rock (as Vaughn's gay bodyguard) are clearly trying hard and even manage to get a fair amount of laughs, but far more of their jokes fall flat than hit. This is not their fault but the fault of the director, F. Gary Gray, whose ear for comedic rhythm is clearly untrained.

While Barry Sonnenfeld's direction of Get Shorty was airtight, disciplined and moved at an incredibly brisk pace, Gray's idea of comedy direction is forcing his actors to mug for laughs like a pleading stand-up comic until the movie slows to halt and the gags grow stale to the point of embarrassment.

I would strongly caution anyone from seeing Be Cool. I found it not only sub-par, but personally insulting. It's one thing to rob us of our time and money with an inferior product, but the fact that the filmmakers realized the movie was shoddy and chose to rub it in our faces instead of making the movie better, makes me think this should have been called Be Cruel.