Hollywood is a callous, fickle and backstabbing land where producers do drugs, have promiscuous sex and use four-letter curse words like it‘s big and clever.

Meanwhile the greedy studio only cares about money and not the artistic integrity of a film. So what’s new?

What Just Happened tramples on this familiar territory. Robert De Niro plays hotshot movie producer Ben, who juggles his time between forcing a director to change the bleak ending of his latest film and getting Bruce Willis to shave his Grizzly Adams beard before he steps on the set of his next feature. As far as plot goes that’s about as good as it gets, and in the middle of that Ben is getting divorced and suspects his soon to be ex-wife may be sleeping with a friend of his.

The seedy underbelly of Hollywood has been overturned on many occasions so What Just Happened‘s director Barry Levinson, who is no stranger to edgy subject material, has his work cut out to tell a tale worth telling. Unfortunately there’s more edge in an episode of the Antiques Roadshow as the film growls like Rockville but bites like a poodle.

Robert De Niro tries to prove that he’s still worth watching after he and Al Pacino disastrously tried to pull off the gruff cop role one last time in Righteous Kill where they looked like they were filled with incontinence rather than any menace or power. Here, though, De Niro manages to come away with his dignity intact as he does an admirable job of bringing life to a self-centered, arrogant, greed-filled producer with a side of sympathy and likeability, which is no easy task. Unfortunately the performance is wasted on a story that meanders along to an unfulfilling conclusion.

The story fails to inspire because nothing particularly exciting takes place; instead what we are given is a series of events that seem pretty trivial to the audience (which may well be the point!) but we never really get deep enough into the supporting characters to care one way or another. Even a self-deprecating Bruce Willis can’t help matters, supplying very little in the way of story or laughs.

The biggest problem with the film is that it has all been done better before, and is even being done better on a weekly basis on television in the thoroughly entertaining show Entourage. Entourage manages to show the dark side of Hollywood through the fun-loving, thick-eyebrowed view of a major Hollywood A-lister and manages to do everything that What Just Happened attempts with more laughs, drama and self-parodying celebrities in the space of half an hour.

What Just Happened is one of those strange films that sits on the fence and never really falls either side, which makes for an anticlimactic movie experience. What you get is the cinematic equivalent of the type of person who makes snarky comments behind everyone’s backs but when confronted mutters to themselves and runs off. A bit of a pussy really.

[story by David Scarborough]