Get Shorty.

Few of us can enact our dreams in our jobs. That lawyer so diligently adding codicils to your will may harbor fantasies of piloting a B-52. It's not easy or practical to switch careers in midlife, so the fantasies must remain just that: the occupations of our unseen selves. Get Shorty is a comedy--an insouciantly violent comedy--about a job switch that fulfills a man's fantasies, and the comedy arises from the fact that the skills of his quondam trade propel the hero successfully into the profession of his dreams. A gangster becomes a moviemaker precisely because he is so good at being a gangster.

When we first met Chili Palmer, an intelligent and rather pleasant young loan shark, he is staring out a restaurant window in Miami. Indifferent to his business partner's small talk, he fantasizes about buying the condemned film theater across the street and turning it into a classic movie revival house. When a more prominent gangster, Barboni, saunters up to their table, Chili's partner is properly obsequious but Palmer at first doesn't even look at him. Barboni is a brutal pig of a man, and his nature makes him perfect for his work. By contrast, Chili seems detached from the realities of his job, almost ethereal. Can this daydreamer really be a gangster? He seems more interested in movies than collecting debts.

Then we see him in action. Ray Barboni, having lost his own coat, casually lifts Chili's black leather jacket from the restaurant's cloak room. Palmer tracks the hoodlum to his lair, breaks his nose with one fast punch, and takes back his property.

You see, the jacket makes Chili look like Al Pacino in Serpico. One just doesn't mess with a movie lover's fantasy life.

This encounter--so economically violent that it makes you gasp and laugh at the same time--both establishes the movie's tone and launches its point. Circumstances place our hero in his enemy's power and Barboni sends him to the West Coast to collect money from a supposedly dead man. But Chili gets Hollywood fever and conducts very fast raids on a series of alien turfs until he gets into precisely the position he covets: the power to make movies.

Chili rarely uses force. Why would he want to hurt people whose trust and aid he might someday need? Besides, he's got an entire arsenal to draw upon: charm, humor, flattery, sexuality, reasonableness, and--most auspiciously--threat. "Look at me," commands Chili repeatedly. And when people see the loan-shark look on his face, a look that tells them they must comply with his logic for want of any solution of their own, they usually crumble. He "reads" them, they can't "read" him, so he wins. Moving within a milieu in which daydreaming, roleplaying, and con games are rife, Chili's certainty of purpose is his clout. He bluffs the bluffers with a confidence they can only envy.

The cunning of Elmore Leonard's book lies in the way it shows us that all the characters, not just Chili, are constantly running movies in the screening rooms of their minds, and that stratagems, manners, even morals, are determined by what each Hollywood "player" has learned from filmgoing. Oddly, this effect is easier to bring off in a novel than a movie. If a film director were to continually insert the movie scenes by which the characters measure reality, he would risk turning Get Shorty into an anthology of old movie clips instead of a good, brisk crime comedy.

Director Barry Sonnenfeld and scriptwriter Scott Frank have chosen a much simpler course: They have the characters constantly refer to movies they've seen, but the real focus is on the strategies and power plays of Chili and his friends and enemies, and we can see for ourselves that the ploys are movie-influenced. So, while the book was basically about the meta-reality experienced by movie-minded people, the movie is more conventional: a comedy about how well-equipped a smart gangster is to swim in the shark-infested waters of Hollywood.

At times, Frank and Sonnenfeld have coarsened the material by straining for laughs and thrills that Leonard, a laid-back storyteller if there ever was one, never intended the material to evoke. By the time one of the Escobar drug lords arrives on the scene, there have been one murder and two beatings too many. And for all the movie's energy and pace, my disbelief wasn't always suspended. Wouldn't the roughneck flung by our hero down a flight of steps in a chic restaurant attract a flutter of concerned waiters? Elmore made this plausible in the book; Sonnenfeld doesn't even try. And he hasn't done well by a couple of his actors. Danny DeVito is miscast as a superstar sought by Palmer to make a project financeable. The star is supposed to be in the DeNiro-Pacino mold: unhandsome but magnetic, not a matinee idol but definitely a star. It's not DeVito's height but his lack of glamour that makes him a burlesque of the role. Rene Russo is well cast as a shrewd actress but has been allowed by the director to give a too tightly corseted, grim performance.

On the other hand, Sonnenfeld and Frank have done many things well. The pace and shape of each scene are calculated to wring every drop of irony and gallows humor out of the material. Many scenes have the feel of comedy sketches but are never allowed to become so farcical that they burst the framework of the story. And, if DeVito and Russo have been mishandled, the rest of the cast is excellent. Gene Hackman and Dennis Farina work successfully toward opposite goals: Hackman, as a hapless producer, makes his usually massive presence seem clutsy, pathetic, dopey, while Farina puffs himself up believably to project Barboni's repulsive thuggishness. Delroy Lindo is on the verge of being typecast but, here playing yet another gangster, still manages to be fearsome in surprising ways.

But, let's face it, all this is prologue. The make-or-break question is, just how good is John Travolta as Chili Palmer?

He's perfect. I mean that quite literally. Even in great performances, there may exist a slight lack of congruence between actor and role. The other day, I caught A Streetcar Named Desire again on TV and noticed a certain daintiness in Brando's demeanor (during his quieter moments) that didn't seem to belong to Stanley Kowalski. This performance is as great as any in American film (certainly greater than anything Travolta has done), but Brando unconsciously lets us know that he is too large for the role even as he illuminates it.

But Travolta, a much narrower actor than Brando, is completely at one with Palmer. There is nothing in his personality or physique that he hasn't tailored for the character. The very way he holds his cigarette delivers an aspect of the man. And, most importantly, Travolta knows how to flick on and off the menace in Palmer's eyes, to replace instantaneously the threat of harm with the promise of friendship, or vice versa. It is this flexible steeliness that makes the gangster memorable.

Some great movies don't give us great characters while some merely good films do. 8 1/2 is probably greater than La Strada, but it's the latter that gave us Gelsomina and Zampano. This new movie is just a good minor work, but it may attain a certain classic status because of its hero. Get Shorty has given us Chili Palmer.