From the brilliant mind of Michel Gondry (The Science of Sleep) comes the utterly monotonous Be Kind Rewind. It takes a lot of painfully contrived setup to reach the mildly funny but ultimately underwhelming payoff here: Jack Black is accidentally magnetized, by means that are irrelevant yet time consuming, and ends up wiping clean the VHS tapes in friend Mos Def's old-fashioned neighborhood video rental store. The duo then attempt to recreate the movies on the shelves themselves in a series of quirky "recreations" that play more like loose parodies. Black and Mos Def handle the oddball comedy here decently, but the spoofs are no sharper or sillier than a cheapo "Saturday Night Live" sketch. The dilemma being that this thing runs on to feature length, dawdling in forced subplots about the changing climate of the local neighborhood, the ugly face of modernization, and the lack of appreciation of "kids these days."Even if you forgive the gaps in logic (and there are plenty), there's still just not enough weirdo charm in this to make it satisfying. Gondry's other works often fell into traps of indulgence and goofiness, but they were bolstered by likable, ratable characters that ultimately overcame the conceptual stubbornness of the piece. This film has nothing approaching that level of warmth. It's dumb and dull from start to finish and will likely be remembered as a blemish on a number of resumes, most prominently Gondry himself, who will hopefully go on to redeem himself with bigger and better projects.
Grade: D+
