Be Kind Rewind

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

There’s an inventive spirit to Be Kind Rewind that’s perfectly suited to today’s do-it-yourself YouTube era: two guys remake a bunch of movies by casting themselves as the leads and using homemade props and sets.

The overarching story is a little too careless, and overdoes the whimsy, but that central conceit proves funny and smart enough, especially when the two guys are Mos Def and Jack Black.

Be Kind Rewind takes place largely on one block of the run-down industrial nothingness of Passaic, NJ. The titular video store – which oddly refuses to carry DVDs, only because it would be catastrophic to the plot if it did – is run by Danny Glover, who goes on a trip to scout out the competition and leaves his apprentice Mike (Def) in charge.

Mike’s screw-up friend Jerry (Black) goes to sabotage the local power plant one night (no idea why), gets electrocuted and magnetized in one wildly over-the-top scene, and the next day goes in the video store and accidentally destroys all the tapes by touching them. When the kooky old lady Miss Falewicz comes in to rent Ghostbusters the next day, Jerry convinces Mike to just film their own version of the movie. She won’t know the difference anyway.

That of course goes over improbably well, and soon Mike and Jerry are remaking all sorts of movies like Rush Hour 2, 2001, and Robocop and calling the process “sweding” (something about Sweden?). The inventive ways the “sweded” movies are filmed takes up most of the middle of the movie, and it’s where the film is most charming. (It’s hard to top Jack Black crying, “What’s happening to our hood!?” while filming Boyz n the Hood.)

The success of the sweded films turns out to be a double-edged sword, because it makes the surrounding movie less than interesting by comparison. Michel Gondry is a very inventive director, but he needs a solid writer to be able to reign him in and tell him when some of his ideas just plain don’t make sense. He’s also sloppy; a girl named Alma (Melonie Diaz) is introduced as a love interest for Mike but is never the least bit developed. That’s a shame, because Diaz turns out to be a really lovely discovery.

Still, it’s the kind of movie that quietly persuades you to ignore its flaws. There are plenty of laughs, and Mos Def is comfortable and charming in the central role. The events leading up to the climax – the store is in danger of being torn down, the sweded movies are ordered to be destroyed because of copyright infringement, etc. – is the kind of off-the-shelf plotting you’d expect, but then Mike and Jerry get the whole town involved in sweding a movie that will save the store, and gosh darn, isn’t it all just adorable.

I’m only half-mocking it. The truth is, Be Kind Rewind is a small, forgettable, sweet ...