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Get Shorty

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Get Shorty (1995)

October. 20,1995
|
6.9
|
R
| Comedy Thriller Crime
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Chili Palmer is a Miami mobster who gets sent by his boss, the psychopathic "Bones" Barboni, to collect a bad debt from Harry Zimm, a Hollywood producer who specializes in cheesy horror films. When Chili meets Harry's leading lady, the romantic sparks fly. After pitching his own life story as a movie idea, Chili learns that being a mobster and being a Hollywood producer really aren't all that different.

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Reviews

Griff Lees
1995/10/20

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

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Anoushka Slater
1995/10/21

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

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Fleur
1995/10/22

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

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Billy Ollie
1995/10/23

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

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generationofswine
1995/10/24

You know what, I really love Elmore Leonard, and a part of me feels that nearly any movie made from his works is going to come out as fresh, original, and worth watching.This is the rare exception.Here they took a classic Elmore Leonard plot and made it too Hollywood for its own good. And then they tried a bit hard to make it too much like a Pulp Fiction film, but with less bleak comedy and more slapstick comedy.You still have Leonard's unique originality...but the story has been raped and what's left is trash.

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TonyMontana96
1995/10/25

(Originally reviewed: 07/03/2017) Deemed a comedy but felt like more of a crime drama with a sense of humour to me, but let's not take anything away from this picture; it's fairly well made. John Travolta play's Chili Palmer, a loan shark with aspirations to become a film producer and he is very compelling here, Hackman play's filmmaker Harry Zimm, Russo play's his female companion Karen Flores, DeVito play's big movie star Martin Weir, Dennis Farina plays Ray Barboni a gangster nicknamed Bones and Delroy Lindo plays Bo Catlett a drug dealer with James Gandolfini as his right hand man who plays a former stuntman named Bear. The performances are great, each character has an interesting complexity to them and the acting is completely impressive all round; as well as a good pace and a couple of amusing one liners.However I did not like it's opening sequence which was a reference to 'Chili Palmer's name, it just wasn't funny, it went something like Chilli, it must be hot in here like it is out there; and fortunately it gets better after that but the picture is disguised as a comedy, now plenty of film's have a sense of humour but does that make them a full on comedy? No it does not, and if it were a comedy, they needed a bit more of a sharper wit to prove so, because I was sure it was a crime thriller and as a crime thriller it is well made, well, the ending is sort of unmemorable and random but up till then I still enjoyed myself, and though the film is not as funny as I had hoped, it's original, superbly acted and has scenes that are simply spellbinding. Barry Sonnenfield's direction is spot on, Scott Franks screenplay has a fair amount of depth and Elmore Leonard's story is always compelling, whether your laughing or not. Get Shorty is stylish, well-paced and at times fairly amusing, it may not be a great film; but it's sure worth seeing; especially for the performances.

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John Brooks
1995/10/26

Why people love it ? Because they feel acting alone is an argument as to a film's quality. Add snappy pseudo-witty dialog, the criminal mob type environment, and as mentioned a good cast of actors and voila. Easy.But really, here's the thing. Relying entirely on the complicated network that is the plot alone, does not make for an effectively good story, or film. Picking up a piece of paper and writing a bunch of different vapid characters with different arbitrary incentives and mixing them all up together without any ultimate moral or any genuine meaning, does not make you a story-writing genius. At all.Structurally, this film is random, the scenes interchangeable. The events just pile on, and yet it feels so immensely linear and uneventful. It's like the film is so dead, and drags on, no action could possibly finally get it going ! It's boring to death, and it never finally picks up.The details are often stupid, and the film relies A LOT on totally convenient details to move on at all. The naivety of a character, the stupidity of another...this is just gratuitous mob-comedy like it was written by amateurs or something.This is more of the same: random tough guy talk, redundant scenes like the guy secretly waiting in the dark at someone's place, the remote killing that makes little to no sense, relying on a character's very particular reaction...And in such films, as the viewer you at least have something big to look forward to at the end, like a twist or a big prize or something special that catches you off-guard and puts the whole picture into perspective... here, nothing. Nothing at all. Boring, boring, boring ! 3/10.

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edwagreen
1995/10/27

To me, this was still another take off on Damon Runyan. The latter always was able to bring in two diverse groups in his stories. This yarn seems to follow that pattern with mobster Chili Palmer, a heavy smoking John Travolta, going to Hollywood and seeing for himself mob-like activities in tinsel town as well.Travolta is very good in the part. What became of the David Palmer character in the film. He had stolen $300,000 from the airline who had paid his family, not realizing that he had taken himself off the plane before it crashed.Dennis Farina, an ex-policeman in real life, is terrific as one of the mobsters and Gene Hackman is a riot in a different type of performance for him as a producer who is in the thick of things as well.I wish that someone could explain to me the role of Danny De Vito here. As a two-time Oscar winner, De Vito's role should have been expanded here. This is also true for Rene Russo.

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