Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind is perhaps best regarded as a metaphor for its director's career: the film takes flight when its protagonists - thinly-veiled versions of stars Jack Black and Mos Def - set about recreating Saturday afternoon staples like Ghostbusters, Rush Hour 2, and RoboCop, and grinds to a halt when the interstitial plot, penned by Gondry himself, kicks in. As deft as he is at applying his whimsical visual stylings to the material of others, he seems incapable of mitigating his own weaknesses as a screenwriter; as with The Science of Sleep, a turgid rip-off of his brilliant Charlie Kaufman-scribed debut, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind's intriguing premise is soon drowned in a pool of lukewarm mediocrity. What plot there is revolves around an eponymous video store, whose VHS-only stock is inadvertently erased by a magnetized Jack Black (don't ask). In order to keep the store - already threatened with demolition in order to make way for condominiums - afloat, Black and Mos Def resort to producing made-to-order "sweded" (the term means nothing) versions of actual movies. Predictably, in Gondry's Capra-esque universe, the gambit pays off, and soon the denizens of Passaic, NJ, are lining up around the block for their own DIY editions.
These charming reproductions, wherein Jack Black hobbles around attired in auto parts as RoboCop or Mos Def attempts to approximate Chris Tucker's machine gun cadence in Rush Hour 2, are the heart and soul of Be Kind Rewind, and it is the film's greatest deficiency that, as a supposed paean to the ramshackle and handmade, it devotes so little time to them. Like Max Fischer's meticulous stage version of Serpico in Rushmore, Be Kind Rewind's reinventions amount to both an homage and a critique, praising the indelible verve and wit of these cheeseball '80s and '90s diversions while implying that present day Hollywood, with its addiction to bigger budgets and garish computer effects, has forgotten that the human element is what causes audiences to form such strong attachments to these movies. If Jack Black and Mos Def can recapture the magic of a WPIX weekend matinee with some tin foil and an ancient video camera, why can't the Wachowski Brothers? Why can't you or I?
Or, more to the point, why can't Gondry? The hysterical "swedeings" only serve to draw an unflattering comparison with the half-bored tone of his film, content to coast along as a vehicle for Black's mugging and Mos Def's shrugging, when it's not busy under-utilizing the veteran presences of Danny Glover or Mia Farrow, who is given little else to do besides act bewildered. An important underlying plot thread involving a mythical - in more ways than one - jazz pianist named Fats Waller is picked up and put down so often that it becomes an irritant. There are a few scattered non-sweded moments of amusement, most notably Danny Glover's video store owner reconnoitering a West Coast Video and arriving at the conclusion that he needs only two sections to succeed: Action-Adventure and Comedy. Yet, for the most part, Be Kind hides its light under a bushel: beyond the extended making of Ghostbusters, the other "swedeings" are handled mostly during amusing montages - in one two minute sequence we see When We Were Kings, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Carrie, and Men In Black. I, for one, felt somewhat duped; having been drawn in with promises of madcap ad hoc recreations and all kinds of goofy movie love, I ended up sitting through, well, Jack Black doing his best to perform CPR on a misfire.
