Mar
7
“Cool World” Review
Filed Under Movies
I must’ve seen the trailer for “Cool World” about a hundred times. It was one of those previews that seemed to be on every VHS tape in my collection, and I’d blow through it on fast forward practically every time. Still, the imagery seemed striking. The film looked like some sort of sleazy take on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” a dark fantasy about a cartoonist who gets to make it with one of his sexy drawings in a parallel universe from his own imagination. And who wouldn’t want to see a movie about that?
Well, a lot of people.
Despite starring a freakishly young Brad Pitt, “Cool World” was a turkey during its initial release in 1992. The amount of walkouts must’ve been staggering. Oh, how I’d've loved to have gone to a Saturday matinee of this and seen the smattering of families gradually filing out of the auditorium after they came to the realization the film’s definitely not “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” This movie must’ve scored more free passes for pissed-off parents than “Batman Returns” that summer.
So what’s “Cool World” all about? That’s what I’ve been asking myself since the closing credits started to roll. Here’s what I was able to come up with.
The film opens (for no particular reason whatsoever) in 1945 with Pitt’s character, Frank Harris, returning from WWII. His mother greets him at the airport, and they go back to her modest home on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Frank changes into a zoot suit as mom prepares dinner. (Hey, where are the cartoon characters? Hang on, there’s tons more useless backstory.) Then Frank shows his mother a motorcycle that he says he won in a card game in Italy. How it suddenly materialized in front of her house is left unexplained. They go for a ride on the bike and get into the least convincing car accident I’ve seen outside of student-produced short films. Lying in the dirt, Frank has some sort of weird WWII flashback, finds his mother dead near the scene of the crash and gets pulled into Cool World by a cartoon mad scientist named Dr. Whiskers.
Oh, yeah, there are cartoon characters in the movie. I’d forgotten, since this thing seemed like a weird, unofficial sequel to “Inglourious Basterds” for like the first ten minutes there.
We flash-forward to 1992 and meet Gabriel Byrne’s character, Jack Deebs, a cartoonist in the hoosegow. It must be some sort of minimum security facility, since he has a drawing table and all of his art supplies. Deebs is drawing a picture of Holli Would, a busty blond bombshell, who comes to life on the page and yanks him into Cool World. There, Holli (voiced by Kim Basinger) dances her little stripper dance in some kind of nightclub populated by the least appealing cartoon characters I’ve ever seen. Holli teases Jack, who seems to be a little bewildered by what’s going on, not unlike the audience. Jack’s then dumped back into the real world and promptly released from prison.
Jack goes back home, visits a comic book store, and readjusts life on the outside, a process that takes, oh, five or six minutes. We do learn that he was put away for killing his wife and her lover. Character sympathy? Eh, who needs it? At any rate, Jack’s then drawn back into Cool World, where we learn from Frank Harris, now a detective working the Cool World beat, that “noids” are not allowed to copulate with “doodles.” But Holli wants to hook up with Jack anyway because, well, she’s essentially sex personified. So, she and Frank do it, and it turns her into Kim Basinger. This is problematic for reasons beyond my understanding. Actually, Kim Basinger’s pretty terrible in this movie, so maybe that’s what it is.
There’s a lot of chasing around between our world and Cool World, none of it particularly interesting. Holli needs to get some MacGuffin called the Spike of Power that’s at the top of a casino in order to make her change into a “noid” permanent. See, she briefly changes back and forth from a noid into a doodle, and so does Jack for whatever reason. I guess it’s like a cartoon character STD flare up or something.
Problems? This movie’s got ‘em. The story is an absolute bugnuts mess. I have no idea who the hero of this movie is or why I should care about any of these people. Is Frank the hero? He’s a cop, trying to keep order. No, he can’t be the hero. He doesn’t really drive the action. Is Jack the hero? He created this kooky place sort of; it’s never made clear why it was around back in ‘45 but is also from Jack’s imagination in ‘92. Still, Jack doesn’t really do much but act like he has no idea what’s going on most of the time; I guess that makes him the audience surrogate. Is Holli the hero? She actually wants something, but beyond the superficial (boobs), we’re really not given much of any reason to root for her.
Okay, so out of three central characters, none of them emerges as the protagonist. This makes the movie seem aimless, since we just watch people we’re not really interested in doing things we’re indifferent about. Who cares if Holli becomes a noid? Who cares if her becoming a noid might destroy our world and Cool World. Both places suck anyway. Sincerely, this movie is so bad, it made me give up on humanity.
How’s the animation? Craptacular. Holli Would is the only cartoon character in the movie that isn’t a grotesquery. I guess that was done intentionally, but sheesh, “Cool World” on a whole is an eyesore. And damn if it isn’t the clunkiest blending of human actors with cartoon characters. Everyone’s eyelines are off; the physical interactions between noids and doodles are awkward; and the sets look like something out of bad dinner theater.
“Cool World” is a cinematic failure of the first order. It’s an interesting footnote in Brad Pitt’s career, but apart from that, this film doesn’t even merit the “so bad it’s good” backhanded compliment. It’s got a cool trailer, though.
-Brad Lohan
Comments
Leave a Reply