In Get Shorty, John Travolta plays Chili Palmer, a mobster who works out of Miami and is affiliated with a big time thug named Ray Bones (Dennis Farina). Ray is a violent man who doesn't like to be messed with, and Chili takes care of business for him.

Ray sends Chili out to Las Vegas to collect on a sizeable debt owed to him, but once he's there, a casino big wig talks Chili into rerouting over to Los Angeles to collect an even larger amount owed by a filmmaker named Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman). Harry is an eclectic man, who produces and directs low budget b-grade horror movies out of California. When Chili heads out that way and gets a taste for filmmaking industry, he figures he can use the skills he learned while working in the mafia to produce his own movies, with a little bit of help from Harry.

Soon Chili gets involved with Harry and his cohorts – Karen Flores (Rene Russo), a b-movie actress and Harry's go to girl for all of his films; Bo Catlett (Delroy Lindo), Harry's money man who gets all of his disposable income and investment capital from selling drugs; and Martin Weir (Danny DeVito), Karen's ex-husband who happens to be a pretty recognizable star in Hollywood, something his insanely inflated ego is only all too happy to tell you about. Weir's nickname happens to be Shorty.

While Chili and his new friends are out in LA making movies, Ray Bones is wondering what happened to him and so he heads out to California to check things out for himself. Chile begins to fall in love with Karen as they spend more time together, and a whole lot of people are going on about a locker at the Los Angeles airport that's got a whole lot of money stored inside of it.

Get Shorty's director, Barry Sonnenfeld, made a name for himself as a cinematographer, most notably through his fantastic work with Joel and Ethan Coen on such films as Miller's Crossing and Blood Simple. Get Shorty was only the fourth film he'd directed at that point, but his experience behind the camera lends itself well to his directorial duties. The film moves along at a pace that many might consider slow, but in reality it's quite deliberate. This isn't an action movie or a crime story, it's a clever satire of the Hollywood machine made by those who work within its confines.

Say what you will about John Travolta's career, but he shines in this role just as he did in Pulp Fiction the year before. He plays his role with just enough smugness to remind us he's a hood, but at the same time as the movie goes along and he gets involved with Karen and starts to make his film, we find he's not a totally unlikable guy – and he never loses his cool. Travolta delivers the dialogue perfectly, as does the rest of the cast, notably Hackman and DeVito who are both great in their supporting roles. Dennis Farino does an admirable job playing the heavy, and seeing James Gandolfini in a small role playing a bodyguard is fun as well.

The main reason to see the film though, aside from the solid camera work, fun and witty story, and solid performances, is the dialogue. A lot of people rag on Quentin Tarantino for trying to sound like Elmore Leonard in his dialogue, and Get Shorty is a good example of just how sharp Leonard can be. The script, adapted from Leonard's book by Scott Frank who also adapted Minority Report, does a great job of bringing the sharp wit and earthy speech patterns of Leonard's hard boiled characters to the big screen.

Video:

The brand new 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen high definition transfer looks very good, but doesn't quite deliver as much as you'd have probably hoped for.

First, the bad news: those familiar with the first DVD release will remember that the movie looked a little bit soft in terms of detail. Sadly, that is still the case here. The bigger problem is in the contract levels, which seem to be a little darker than they probably should have been. I tested this on two different sets and an both sets had to adjust the levels a little bit to get it up to where it looked right to my eyes.

The good news is that the colors look nice and solid, black levels don't pixelate, edge enhancement is minor (though there are one or two scenes where it is quite painfully obvious), and the transfer is pretty strong once you eliminate the contrast issues. Print damage is almost entirely non-existent and the image is clean as a whistle from start to finish. Grain has pretty much been abolished on this transfer and for the most part, it is pretty good – I just felt that it could have been better.