Cool World - 1 star out of 10

Cool World - 1 star out of 10

“Sexy Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (a.k.a. "Cool World") is a mess.  Riding on the coattails of the Disney film, this gritty approach to live-action-meets-animation took a promising idea and destroyed it.  This movie is way too tame to be taken seriously.  In order to succeed, it needed to be a lot more risqué so that the shock value would eliminate the "cartoon" aspect and turn the animation into an artistic device; unfortunately, the nearly pornographic main character was already way too much.  Additionally, the mood is entirely off.  Is this supposed to be a goofy comedy or a serious crime drama?  Every potentially poignant moment is spoiled by some dumb cartoon antic.  The movie is very confused and without any brand-name cartoon characters that we recognize, there is absolutely no draw.  And another thing that has been bothering me: if this entire world was designed by one cartoonist, why are half of the characters sultry women and the other half goofball cartoon animals having anvils dropped on them?  If you told me "Gritty Crime Film in an Animated World," I would be excited to watch, but that description does not line up with "Cool World.  Outside of its conceptional failure, the acting is beyond bad in this film.  It is a definitive low point in Brad Pitt’s career.  Moreover, I’m still trying to figure out how Kim Basinger’s career ever recovered from this.  It only takes 2 minutes out of the cartoon realm to realize that she is about to deliver one of the worst performances in history and needs to turn back into a cartoon immediately.  I usually think that the Golden Raspberries are mean and unnecessary but hers was very, very well-deserved.  I'm pretty sure that watching this film is included in one of Dante's Nine Circle's of Hell.  The only compliment that I can pay to this film is a single moment when the guys sitting around the poker table are transformed into the dogs from C.M. Coolidge’s “Waterloo.”  That moment made me laugh out loud but every other moment of the film is so awful that I didn't have the heart to laugh at it.  "Cool World" is too tame to succeed but raunchy enough that it fails.