“I didn’t sabotage the power plant. The power plant sabotaged me!”
Be Kind Rewind is a treat for those who find Jack Black inherently funny. For the tasteless snobs who prefer his comic antics somewhat tempered (or, even worse, can’t stand him at all), it will feel like he’s trying way too hard for laughs. I count myself among the former, so Mr. Black’s manic shenanigans are more than enough to entertain me for an hour and a half. Like his priest moonlighting as a pro wrestler in Nacho Libre (a nostalgic guilty pleasure), the junkyard-dwelling conspiracy nut he plays here is an outrageous caricature that allows the actor to indulge his silliest improvisational whimsies as he plays off of Mos Def’s laid back video store clerk, Danny Glover’s old school shop owner, and Melonie Diaz’s laundrywoman-cum-moviemaker. Visually inventive and underscored with a passion for the art of DIY filmmaking, the only letdown is writer/director Michel Gondry’s simplistic screenplay, which corrals us toward a hollow, sentimental finale that feels disconnected from the oddball charm of the rest of the film.
Mr. Fletcher’s (Glover) eponymous video rental store is running on fumes. Despite his claim that the dilapidated building was the birthplace of jazz pianist Fats Waller and his catchy marketing pitch of “one dollar for one movie for one day,” his business is underwater. His shelves of silent, cult, and documentary movies on VHS only attract a niche crowd of eccentrics and seniors and can’t compete with the mainstream DVD market (this was before streaming was commonplace). The city has condemned his building as a slum and given him sixty days to make several required repairs or else they’ll demolish his home and business and force him to move to the projects. When Fletcher leaves for a weekend of memorializing Fats Waller and scouting out some DVD rental stores for innovative ideas, he leaves his sole employee Mike (Mos Def) with one single instruction: keep Jerry out of the store.
Written backwards on the foggy train window, Fletcher’s message remains unintelligible to Mike until he’s already failed to follow it. Jerry (Black) is Mike’s paranoid friend who lives in a trailer in a nearby junkyard and wears a colander on his head to ward off the mind control rays from the power plant that he believes are melting his brain. In one of the film’s several outright brilliant comic moments, the duo camouflage themselves and head into the night to sabotage the power plant to ease Jerry’s mental suffering. When a cop car pulls up, Jerry commands Mike to freeze midway through climbing a stepladder over a security fence. As both stand immobile, a full shot shows us the details of their camouflage. Painted across their clothing and skin are elements of the ladder, the fence and some signage. The camo pattern would make little sense except in the exact orientation in which they find themselves but it effectively renders them “invisible” to the cops who stand a few feet away. Spooked by the encounter, Mike leaves Jerry to undertake the two man mission on his own, which leads to Jerry getting electrocuted.
It turns out that the zap has left Jerry in a magnetized state. The next day when he enters the store, his presence warps the television display. Gondry creatively warps the full picture for effect as well. Inadvertently, his magnetic presence also erases all of the VHS tapes in the store, a fact confirmed by Mike as he frantically claws his way through the entire inventory. When Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow) demands to rent Ghostbusters and won’t take no for an answer, Mike begins to panic. No other stores carry a VHS copy, he strikes out with his friends, and he is on the verge of crisis. But Jerry saves the day with a genius idea—they’ll just remake it with a cheap camera, cheap effects, and themselves as the stars. “I’m Bill Murray, you’re everybody else,” Mike says, and they head to the library to begin shooting.
To accommodate the next round of customers they remake RoboCop, The Lion King, and Rush Hour 2. During the filming of the latter, Jerry refuses to film a kissing scene with his mechanic (Irv Gooch), who agreed to humor his quirky friends by dressing up as a woman. Desperately, because the film needs to be delivered to a paying customer, they enter a laundromat and cast Alma (Diaz) on the spot. Word of their goofy spoofs quickly spreads, and although no one believes they’re the actual movies, the community comes to adore these “sweded” DIY remakes. Soon, there’s a line out the door of people who want sweded versions of dozens of films. In a neat montage, we’re taken through the makeshift production of a handful of sweded films—2001, When We Were Kings, King Kong, Carrie, Men in Black… the list goes on.
When Fletcher returns, he initially tries to put a stop to the sweding frenzy but soon acquiesces and allows it to continue. The situation is brought to a head when two suits arrive claiming the sweded films are violating copyright laws and crushes them all with a steamroller. In order to save the store, the DIY filmmakers launch their most ambitious project yet—a weeklong production to create a fake documentary on the life of Fats Waller.
When it focuses on comedy and joyfully celebrating the art of moviemaking, Be Kind Rewind is a blast. While most of the cast utilizes understated dry humor, Jack Black is in full on black hole mode—hilarious to me, but admittedly not for everyone. Like the best comedians, his performance can’t be reduced to highlights (although there are several); it’s his loose, giddy presence that makes it fun, throwing in trivial side comments and imbuing straight lines with infectious humor. The shift toward a sentimental dramatic arc in its final act is not bad, I just didn’t care enough about it to stay invested when it stopped being funny. And it kind of lost me once Mia Farrow started earnestly promoting the outright revision of history.
Though shy of greatness, Be Kind Rewind is worthy on the merits of Jack Black alone. If that’s your thing, the shortcomings won’t bother you too much. If you can’t stand Jack Black at his zaniest, you won’t be converted.