Review
THE LADYKILLERS
Starring Tom Hanks, Marlon Wayons and Irma P. Hall
Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen
Opens Friday, March 26
Check listings
O Coen brothers, where art thou? With the one-two thud of Intolerable Cruelty and now The Ladykillers, filmmaking sibs Joel and Ethan Coen are in danger of imitating Woody Allen in his late career, putting out two or more crappy films for every good one. I wouldn’t go so far as to call them hacks yet, but they could stand to pause for an original idea to strike before lifting a pen and camera and our wallets again.
The Ladykillers is a flaccid remake of the 1955 British caper starring Alec Guinness, transplanted to the deep South and featuring Tom Hanks in his first straightforward comic role since he started hoovering up those Oscars. He does know a meaty part when he reads one, even if it’s surrounded by a lot of excess fat. Hanks sinks his false teeth into the role of Goldthwait Higginson Dorr III, Ph.D., a former classics professor who looks like Colonel Sanders but speaks like Major Winchester from M.A.S.H. As the film opens, Goldthwait arrives at the doorstep of Mrs. Munson (Irma P. Hall), hoping to rent a room in her house and secretly burrow a tunnel through her basement to the counting room of a nearby casino. The team he’s assembled for the heist is introduced in a series of vignettes worthy of the Coen name – the best is the helmet-cam used to show Lump (Ryan Hurst) getting tackled repeatedly in a football game from his point of view. Lump is the meathead of the team, and after he’s introduced, he’s no longer funny. The others are better fleshed out but still unoriginal. We have a taciturn Asian general, a handlebar-moustached explosives expert with irritable bowel syndrome and Marlon Wayans as a booty-lovin’, expletive-spouting janitor (a borderline offensive stereotype if there ever was one).
The Coens take forever setting up their characters and building up to the heist, so by the time Goldthwait’s posse hits a snag, the movie’s almost over. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but aren’t capers supposed to be fast-paced, zany and full of surprises? In the absence of any narrative complexity, the pleasure in this film, as in all the Coen brothers’ work, lies in the odd character details and strong performances. Mrs. Munson is a fittingly down-to-earth foil for the florid-tongued Goldthwait, and Hall delivers the deadpan goods against Hanks’s initially charming, increasingly grating mannerisms like his Butthead-style snigger. Pretty much every interesting detail gets ironed into a cliché by the end.
The biggest disappointment is Goldthwait. The Coen brothers have a forest-for-the-trees problem with him, carving out the minutiae of his character in long, chatty scenes, yet failing to give us any larger sense of his transformation from professor to criminal, let alone from gentleman criminal to assassin. The Ladykillers offers no flashbacks and no voiceovers to give us a peek inside Goldthwait’s mind. Like the film itself, he’s all surface and no substance. |
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.