This year is shaping up as the year of offbeat comedies. With classically styled comedies are flopping at the box office, those with a distinctly alternative flair are drawing viewers.”Be Kind, Rewind” offers an original concept of this new genre.
The story follows Mike (Mos Def), a clerk at an aging video store. After a botched sabotage attempt on the local power plant, Mike’s friend Jerry (Jack Black) becomes magnetized and accidentally erases all the tapes in the video store. In a desperate bid not to disappoint the store’s best customer Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow) and the store’s proprietor Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), Mike and Jerry hatch a cunning plan to remake all of the movies by themselves.
One has to appreciate the sheer originality of the concept, as well as the unlikelihood that it would have become a movie. This idea seems like something one might scrawl on a grease-spattered paper plate in their friend’s apartment at 3 a.m. after imbibing copious amounts of certain psychotropic substances. It is the sort of idea that you and your friends have a good chuckle at the next day while relating the events of the previous evening. The social conventions demanding that people act in a logical and rational manner are meant to prevent ideas like this from coming to fruition. Writer and director Michael Gondry proved himself free of these conventions with “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and now with this film, he does it again and does it well.
Although the first 20 minutes are slow, action picks up once the duo starts filming their remakes. Unfortunately, things get bogged down once again as Gondry tries to inject some highly unnecessary melodrama into the story. In the end, what we get is a comedy that could have been outrageously funny, but ends up taking itself a little too seriously for its own good.
Mos Def and Jack Black work very well as comic foils to one another. Def’s nervous skepticism blends wonderfully with Black’s optimistic strangeness. While this movie could hardly be considered a buddy flick, it might be nice to see these two working together again in the future. The love interest that is not quite a love interest Alma (Melonie Diaz) manages to be quirky for more than just the sake of being quirky, and Danny Glover has obviously come a long way since his “Lethal Weapon” days.
“Be Kind, Rewind” fails to hit the mark, but it does not miss by much. What worked for Gondry in the past is exactly what fails him in this movie, but fans of Gondry’s previous work will find a lot to love in this film.
