Coverage:

Once in awhile, not often, a comedy comes along that's sharp, smart, and doesn't insult your intelligence. Get Shorty  is such a picture. John Travolta plays Chili Palmer, a loanshark enforcer, who while being in Hollywood a couple of days, collecting a bad debt, decides he's missed his calling.      Travolta is suppose to collect the bad debt from Hackman, a "B" horror movie producer who gets much of his financing from local hood Delroy Lindo. The only problem with this method of financing is that Hackman's films always lose money.      While in Hollywood, Travolta gets the movie bug and comes up with a way to use wise-guy money to produce a sure-fire script that Hackman has been sitting on for years.      Suddenly the word is out; Hackman has a dynamite screenplay. Soon everybody in the rackets wants to go legit and produce it.      Get Shorty is a funny and smart satire of how the movie business is run -- more ruthlessly than any mob family. It's hard to point out one single best performance. Lindo does the same great job here as he did in Clockers.. Fact is, Travolta, Hackman, and Lindo play off each other perfectly in this movie and look like they're having fun doing it.