Be Kind Rewind: Fast Forward This One review

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Tropic Thunder prompted me to go for another Jack Black movie. So Be Kind Rewind it was. But this one's nowhere as funny. In fact it's not funny at all.

A few years ago, Black starred in School of Rock. A comedy that, apart from being funny, made you nostalgic about good old classic rock. Every time the name of a rock band was mentioned, your lips would curl into a smile and the head would nod involuntarily. Be Kind attempts to do something similar with movies. The names of the movies aren't just mentioned, classic scenes are reenacted, re-shot and sweded for audiences. Now what is this ‘˜sweded'? Read on to find out the answer.

Danny Glover runs a video store that stocks film titles in VHS, as the title suggests. No the story is contemporary, its just that ol' man Glover hasn't kept in touch with time. Expectedly, business is slow and property sharks are zeroing in. One day he leaves his store in charge of his apprentice (Mos Def) and goes on a trip to celebrate the 60^th anniversary of a late Jazz great, Fats Waller (fictional I guess, haven't bothered to checked). That's when in a freak accident, too badly played out to describe, the neighborhood bum (Black) erases all the tapes at one go. But the show must go on, especially since ol' man Glover has sent in a spy (Mia Farrow, adding nothing to the movie) to check if everything is OK. In what is the most innovative part about the movie, Black and Def re-shoot the movies, or at least the main parts, alternating between actor and cinematographer. They call them "sweded" because they are supposed to be "imported from Sweden". I tried looking hard for a pun here, but this is one of those words that seem funny at the moment when you conjure them up but loose their edge when repeated often.

The film starts out with a pseudo documentary on Fats Waller and continues in the jazzy vein for a bit. Then this theme is dropped and all of a sudden it's all about the movies. Now I am no filmmaker but opening the film with clippings from the sweded films would have looked nice. The first half of the movie before the sweding starts is a drag. Not enough material for Black to play out his jokes. And Mos Def is worse. Firstly he is black and you may call this stereotyping but there are certain assumptions that are attached to any black actor in a funny movie. He has to be fast talking and wise cracking and a few racial jokes are in order please! Instead Def is this slightly soft-in-the-head, talking-in-a-drawl kinda guy who doesn't crack any jokes. If you have to be a foil to Jack Black, you better get your act together.

There are some good parts which might actually make you laugh but they come so late and infrequently that you'd rather save your facial muscles from that stain. Such as when Black dresses up as Jessica Tandy when they swede Driving Miss Daisy, it was amusing but I didn't laugh. The potential underlying the scene wasn't exploited fully. Towards the end the comedy is abandoned in favour of sentimentality. The focus shifts to the making of the documentary we see at the beginning. It could make an engaging film in itself. But bundling it up with screwball is not a great idea after all.

Be Kind is a film with great premise, but it never goes beyond that. Which is a huge disappointment for Jack Black fans who have come to expect certain standards from his films. My request to filmmakers who thrive on remakes...do not wait for another 25 years before giving this one a second look, do it right now!!!

[rating:1.5]