Almost thirty years ago, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty made its inauspicious debut in theaters. An R-rated crime comedy for adults released in late October doesn’t exactly come across as major box office material, but the movie wound up becoming a surprise hit for MGM, grossing roughly $115 million worldwide on an estimated budget of $30 million.Based on the novel by renowned author Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty kicked off a decade of fascination with Leonard’s darkly comedic crime fiction. Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, and the short-lived TV series Karen Sisco and Maximum Bob were all based on Leonard’s works and all came out within the same five-year span in the late 1990s. (Meanwhile, Timothy Olyphant’s later FX drama Justified is based on a series of Leonard’s novels and short stories.) But in my opinion, Get Shorty is not only the best Leonard adaptation, but also one of the best crime comedies ever made (with apologies to Quentin and Steven). I’ve seen this dang thing probably 100 times, and what makes it so enduring for me is its incredible ensemble cast, most of whom are playing wildly against type.

What Is 'Get Shorty' About?

Get Shorty - 1995
Image via MGM

If you’ve not seen it, I demand to know what the hell is wrong with you but will never know the answer because we are no longer on speaking terms. The film follows a Miami loan shark named Chili Palmer (played very much according to type by John Travolta), who travels to Vegas and then Los Angeles chasing a debt only to get mixed up with a bumbling film producer named Harry Zimm and his criminal financiers. Chili is a movie buff, and he quickly abandons his duties as a mob enforcer to pursue a career as a Hollywood producer, much to the chagrin of his former boss in Miami and Harry’s murderous investors. It’s a charmingly fresh subversion of crime tropes, and while its two leads are arguably the least interesting characters - Travolta plays Chili as a stoic tough guy who occasionally breaks into adorably infectious bouts of cinephile enthusiasm, while Rene Russo as struggling actress Karen Flores isn’t given much to do – the rest of the cast propels Get Shorty into all-time status.

It’s impossible to talk about Get Shorty without devoting several paragraphs to Dennis Farina, a man with such extreme Chicago energy that it’s almost a physical presence shoving people aside and knocking over furniture in every room he inhabits. Farina plays the secondary antagonist Ray Bones, a Miami gangster who follows Chili Palmer to Los Angeles to try and collect the debt (and also kill Chili or otherwise exact some form of revenge). Farina was a character actor I always enjoyed, but his performance as Ray Bones is an all-timer. At once broadly comedic and vaguely threatening, he casually delivers lines like “Have you spoken with Mr. Palmer since your husband blew up?” moments before shockingly breaking a woman’s nose. He’s both a hilarious character and an unrepentant scumbag, and Farina is having so much dang fun playing him that the performance virtually pops off of the screen.

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Ray Bones is an interesting villain, because Chili is never really in any danger from him. Chili thoroughly deflates him in every confrontation, the first few of which we see in a delightful quasi-montage in the beginning of the film. But Ray causes plenty of chaos for the people in Chili’s orbit, like breaking the aforementioned widow’s nose and beating the absolute Tuesday out of Gene Hackman. (This is an expression I’ve just invented here meaning Hackman’s ass gets beaten so hard he no longer experiences that particular day of the week.) Seriously, Ray destroys Harry’s office with the sheer force of his ass-kicking. Lowly henchman Ronnie (played by Uncle Rico himself, Jon Gries) shows up midway through this savage beating and hilariously fails to intimidate Ray, who then unceremoniously shoots Ronnie to death. I explain this scene in detail to point out that even though it is the most violent sequence of the film (Ray gleefully beats Harry within an inch of his life and then murders a man without a second thought), it’s also one of the funniest thanks to Farina’s delivery. (At one point, Harry weakly points a gun at Ray, and after a brief considering pause Ray dismissively says, “Ok knock it off, Harry.”) Ray causes so much damage, but none of it ever really makes its way back to Chili. He’s basically an angry clown, and I would’ve watched Farina play him in five more movies. (Sadly, he didn’t make the cut for Get Shorty’s 2005 sequel Be Cool, but that’s probably for the best, because Be Cool isn’t a very good movie.)

'Get Shorty's Excellent Collection of Supporting Actors

Get Shorty James Gandolfini Delroy Lindo
Image via MGM

Speaking of Hackman, he fully rules in this movie playing one of the most non-Gene Hackman roles of his entire career. Harry Zimm is a dimwitted movie producer who gets way in over his head doing business with Actual Criminal Bo Catlett (Delroy Lindo, to whom I will devote considerable space shortly). Hackman rarely plays outright fools, but he takes a mighty big swing in Get Shorty. Never has a man truly had no idea what the fuck he is doing more than Harry Zimm. He’s a schlocky B-movie horror director, a terrible businessman with little creative imagination prone to near-farcical explosions of ineptitude. After Chili agrees to help get Bo off of his back, Harry completely blows his first meeting with Bo, all but tripping over himself to undermine everything Chili says and does. Hackman doesn’t play the character in a self-aware way (indeed, one of Harry’s biggest flaws is his total lack of awareness), which makes his cataclysmic failures even more absurdly funny to watch. He’s a man who chronically makes everything worse, and watching him struggle in scenes with the shrewd and dangerous Bo is something else.

Speaking of Bo, Delroy Lindo fucking rips and it’s a crime that he’s not in seven motion pictures every month. If there is any justice in this universe, he’ll get his first Oscar win this year for his gut-wrenching performance in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, but that’s a different article for another time. Today we’re talking about Get Shorty, and Lindo plays chief antagonist Bo Catlett with such cool easy menace that you kind of want to hang out with him, even if your better judgment is screaming against that idea. He almost purrs out lines like “I can’t wait for you to be dead.” Even his name is cool – Bo Catlett. That’s a cool ass name. Bo is an infinitely more capable villain than Ray Bones, and even though he’s ultimately no match for Chili, he presents the only real threat in the film, and that threat is considerable.

James Gandolfini plays Bo’s reluctant muscle, a former stuntman named Bear. Bear is almost the exact opposite of Gandolfini’s iconic character Tony Soprano – he’s a basically good man struggling with all the criminal shit he has to do for Bo, who has him trapped in an extremely unequal business relationship. In one of Bo’s most chilling scenes, he vaguely threatens Bear’s young daughter and reminds the stuntman that if he ever goes down (either to jail or into the ground), he’s taking Bear down with him. Even though Chili thoroughly embarrasses Bear in both of their physical encounters, he instantly lights up when he learns that Bear used to work in the movies, and the two men develop an amiable rapport that foreshadows the film’s climax.

Finally, there’s Danny DeVito as aloof, pretentious movie star Martin Weir. Karen (who used to be married to Weir) arranges a meeting between Weir and Chili, during which Chili is supposed to pitch Weir Harry’s script for a film called Mr. Lovejoy. But he accidentally pitches an entirely different movie based on his current situation, about a loan shark traveling across the country to collect a massive debt from a man who faked his own death to get out of paying it. Weir is infinitely more interested in this movie than Mr. Lovejoy, and he spends the rest of the film excitedly developing it in subsequent meetings with Chili. Weir is an extremely minor character (I believe he’s only in 3 or 4 scenes), but DeVito absolutely crushes it, as is his way. Like Hackman’s Harry Zimm, Martin Weir is a character totally against DeVito’s usual type. He’s a soft-spoken artiste, a wholly self-involved man who exists in an entirely separate universe from the rest of us. It’s endlessly fun to watch DeVito lampoon the archetype of a self-important movie star, and watching his performance it's easy to imagine he’s worked with a few people exactly like Weir.

After a quarter century, Get Shorty remains one of the most pleasant moviegoing experiences I’ve ever had. The comedy is pitch-perfect, the performances (particularly by the supporting cast) are expert, and the requisitely convoluted crime plot is layered with enough irony and absurdity to keep you engaged without stressing you out or (even worse) insulting your intelligence with embarrassingly unearned twists. It’s a wonderful movie, and you should check it out if for no other reason than to hear Harvey Keitel as Dennis Farina shout, “Fuck you, fuckball,” directly into camera while Danny DeVito fails to use a prop gun correctly. Trust me, that sentence will make sense after you’ve seen the film.