Author: Tyler Kearn
Be Kind Rewind is an unusual film, especially given the promotions that portrayed it as a “typical” Jack Black comedy. It is a film that starts slowly and takes a long time to pick up steam, has a very funny middle and a surprisingly bittersweet ending.
The premise of the film is both outlandish and clever. Elroy Fletcher (Danny Glover) owns a corner video rental shop in Passaic, NJ that has been a landmark of the community for a long time. Working for Fletcher is Mike (Mos Def), whose loser friend Jerry (Black) is always hanging around the store.
Fletcher finds out the store has been condemned and that he needs to raise a seemingly impossible amount of money to save it. He leaves town, looking to scout out the latest in video rentals (DVDs), and leaves Mike in charge of the store.
Jerry, who believes the government is trying to control him with microwaves, attempts to sabotage a power station and-instead of being electrocuted and instantly killed-is magnetized, causing him to accidentally erase all the videos in the store.
Panicked, Jerry and Mike come up with the idea to re-shoot the erased films themselves, creating hilarious 20-minute remakes of famous movies such as Ghostbusters that quickly become hits. What happens from there, and whether Mr. Fletcher’s store is saved, I will not reveal.
By far, the funniest parts of the film are its remakes of other famous films, which act as a showcase for Black’s craziness and antics. The remakes are especially funny to those who are familiar with the originals, so someone who is well-versed in all sorts of Hollywood films would really appreciate this portion of the film.
The rest of the film is much more serious, musing on the nature of a community, its history and its collective memory. It’s interesting and shockingly heartfelt, but it is not straight-up comedy.
Black has made a living by playing characters who are losers but seem to have one redeeming quality or ability that helps them. In this film, that ability happens to be Black’s real-life talent-being magnetic (pun intended) on camera. But Black takes the loserdom too far in this one, getting lost in playing a character that wears aluminum foil hats and worries about being controlled by microwaves. This puts Black’s character more at odds with the times when he allows his energy and craziness to come out. That’s also largely responsible for why the parts of the film with movie remakes seem so much more fun and vibrant than the rest of the film.
Mos Def does an admirable job playing the straight man to both sides of Jack Black. He wisely gives a more understated performance instead of trying to match Black’s energy, and he genuinely seems to care about Fletcher and the community during the more dramatic moments.
Ultimately, whether or not you will like this film is largely dependent on your expectations going into it. If you go in to the film expecting a laugh-a-minute, you will probably be disappointed, but if you go in with an open mind, it’s possible to find some satisfying substance.
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