The Brad Pitt movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “A surprisingly incompetent film”
As hard as it may be to imagine these days, there was a time when Brad Pitt wasn’t considered a movie star. In fact, by 1992, he’d already made ten films during which he evolved from a glorified extra to an eye-catching supporting player to indie leading man. Yet, he still wasn’t considered bankable enough to lead a major Hollywood movie.
So, in his first big studio production, Pitt received third billing behind Gabriel Byrne (who also didn’t have a true hit to his name) and Kim Basinger, then only three years removed from playing Vicki Vale in Batman. However, the movie’s director intended it to be a star vehicle for Pitt, who he originally envisioned in Byrne’s role, and was determined it would be a showcase for the dynamic young star.
Unfortunately, despite legendary underground animator/director Ralph Bakshi having the best of intentions for Pitt, the movie he saddled the young star with was an unmitigated disaster. In fact, it was such a creative failure that Roger Ebert scathingly dubbed it “a surprisingly incompetent film” – and that was just about the nicest thing he had to say about it.
The film was the brainchild of Bakshi, who rose to fame in the ’70s with Fritz the Cat, the first X-rated cartoon ever made. It told the story of a horny, marijuana-smoking alley cat who accidentally became a left-wing revolutionary, which should give some idea about Bakshi’s subversive, satirical leanings. Therefore, when Cool World was pitched as a live-action/animation hybrid that would be Who Framed Roger Rabbit for adults, its utter strangeness should have been expected.
Cool World told the story of a cartoonist (Byrne) transported to an animated dimension populated by characters he created, including the sexy femme fatale Holli Would (Basinger), who wants to seduce him. You see, if she has sex with her creator, she will become human and be unleashed in the real world. Pitt played Frank Harris, a World War II veteran who was teleported to Cool World and became a detective, and he teams up with the cartoonist to stop Holli’s nefarious plan.
If you think any of this sounds very execution-dependent, and that it could be a mess without a safe pair of hands in charge, you get a cold star. Cool World’s plot teetered on the edge of plausibility from the start, but Bakshi couldn’t get it under control, and it largely left audiences baffled. Couple that with the poor compositing of animated and live-action elements, and it was evident to anyone with eyeballs that this misbegotten film was no Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Ebert was cutting when he wrote about the movie’s animation in his one-star review, noting that it “seems to have been created by Ralph Bakshi with an unrealistic idea of how quickly we can comprehend visual information. A great deal of this film is so complex, chaotic, quick-cut and fast-moving that it is impossible to sit in the audience and figure out what is being depicted.”
In addition, he never once bought the integration of human and animated characters, writing, “a human character will throw an arm around the shoulders of a cartoon and the mismatch will be so distracting it’s the only thing we can look at on the screen.” Worst of all, though, was Ebert’s damning indictment of Bakshi’s abilities as a storyteller. He drew particular attention to one nightclub set piece in particular, which he dubbed “almost a textbook example of incompetent writing, directing, filmmaking, acting – and, most importantly, storytelling”.
In the end, Pitt got off lightly, as he wasn’t singled out for any criticism by the iconic Chicago Sun-Times critic. Still, it’s not the biggest shock to discover the star has barely spoken about Cool World since its release, even when it started to develop something of a cult following in the darker corners of the internet.
