In “Get Shorty,” Miami gangster Chili Palmer (John Travolta) followed a delinquent debt to Los Angeles and blundered into a career as a movie producer. In the sequel, “Be Cool,” Palmer moves his wiseguy skills to the music industry, where the natives are a bit harder to muscle.

“This is the music business,” a rival tells him. “We’re all wiseguys!”
And so it goes in “Be Cool,” a showbiz farce designed to outmuscle the original on its own turf. It has more lowlifes, more schemes, more stars (Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, The Rock, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and hip-hop impresario Andre Benjamin all drop by) and altogether more shootings, beatings and cartoonish violence of varying stripes. What it doesn’t have is more brains, humor or spark.

“Cool” is an elliptical, untidy affair — the sort of sequel that’s clever enough to make jokes about sequels, but not good enough to overcome the sequel stigma itself.

Which is a shame, because the Palmer character — originally created by novelist Elmore Leonard, who wrote the source books for both movies — is one of the better roles Travolta has inhabited since his “Pulp Fiction” resurrection. Even here, the actor radiates a singular, Zenlike smoothness as Palmer, now a successful movie producer weary of prima donna actors and studio meddling. When a record label acquaintance is gunned down at a Melrose cafe, Palmer sees an opportunity and partners up with the widow, Edie Athens (Thurman of “Kill Bill”), to produce the debut record of one Linda Moon (Def Jam recording star Christina Milian), a Beyonce-type warbler contractually bound to a floundering R&B trio.

Convinced that Linda could be the next Big Thing, Palmer snatches her away from her nitwit, Eminem-wannabe manager Raji (Vaughn, affecting a ghetto limp). A bit more tricky is the issue of Raji’s hard-nosed business partner Nick Carr (Harvey Keitel), who knows Palmer from the old days and isn’t so easy to push around.

From here, director F. Gary Gray — stepping in for the sorely missed Barry Sonnenfeld (“Men in Black”) — embarks on a tedious, circular spree of botched hits, double-crosses and mysterious Russian gangsters, whose involvement in the affair is never adequately explicated by Gray or screenwriter Peter Steinfeld, who evidently is making a career of driving film franchises into a wall (he also penned “Analyze That”). Whatever. Only one detail really matters: Palmer has to put $300,000 in the hands of hip-hop godfather Sin LaSalle (played by the aforementioned Entertainer) by week’s end or the guy’s gat-toting nephew (Benjamin) will go Suge Knight on his ass.

Despite a veritable highway of dead spots, “Be Cool” does have some funny moments; action star The Rock (“Walking Tall”) is an anabolic hoot as Raji’s gay, aspiring actor bodyguard Elliot, and Benjamin fares nicely in a mostly mute role. More pointedly, the thing that “Be Cool” lacks is comic momentum; Gray — who crafted such comedy classics as “The Negotiator” and “The Italian Job” (all sarcasm aside, he also directed “Friday,” but that was all about Chris Tucker) — never finds a current that he can ride.

His is a segmented piece of direction, more anthology than movie.
Part of the problem resides in the patently unfunny way Gray pays reverence to pop music, both through Milian’s earnest musical pieces and in a ridiculous heart-to-heart that Palmer shares with Tyler, playing himself. “Get Shorty” was funny because the filmmakers weren’t afraid to take the tinkle out of their town. “Be Cool” is just a bit too worried about being cool.