Review

Review Date: 28-March-04
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Junk

The Ladykillers (2004)

Five months ago I reviewed the screwball romantic comedy "Intolerable Cruelty" and concluded "it's time for me to accept that I'm not on the same wavelength as the Coen brothers." Today I sit down to review the screwball heist comedy "The Ladykillers" and conclude that not only am I on a different wavelength than the Coen brothers, but this might be a mark of good taste.

"The Ladykillers" is a remake of a 1955 movie starring Alec Guinness, as filtered through the strange little minds of co-writers and -directors Joel and Ethan Coen. Tom Hanks stars as "Professor" Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, an unctuous southern gentleman with an enormous vocabulary, a love of Poe, and a hunger for ill-gotten gains. As part of his plan to rob a Mississippi casino boat, Dorr rents a room from a god-fearing old widow named Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall), whose root cellar is only a short tunneling distance away from the boat's onshore vault. Under the guise of rehearsing a renaissance quintet, the professor assembles a team for the job: Gawain (Marlon Wayans), the inside man at the casino; Pancake (J.K. Simmons), the explosives expert; The General (Tzi Ma), who knows tunnels; and Lump (Ryan Hurst), who supplies the muscle. Standing in the way of the group's dream of 1.2 million dollars (which doesn't sound like all that much when split five ways) is a slew of supposedly comic pitfalls, including the seemingly helpless and generally clueless Mrs. Munson.

It's a rare film that can make so fine an actor as Hanks seem tedious, but "The Ladykillers" manages to do just that. Dorr looked like a hoot in the trailer, but the sum of his particular brand of humor doesn't bear examination for anything longer than two minutes. As in most Coen pictures, when you take away the obvious quirks and punchlines of the characters, there is nothing left --- no soul, no motivation, no history, no personality. Once again, I found myself lamenting that modern comedies always take the easiest route, so that even such reputedly idiosyncratic filmmakers as the Coens just feed me boring stereotypes (the vulgar young black guy, the aging hippie, the dumb jock). As for Hanks, he quickly settles into a bizarre groove that doesn't rely too much on the Eccentric Academic, but then the script leaves him riffing on it with no need for growth or variation. It tires, quickly.

The title suggests (as did the trailer) that "The Ladykillers" would focus on the unexpected confrontation between the professor and Mrs. Munson, two people with nothing in common except iron wills. Unfortunately, this isn't the case; the potentially amusing old lady often disappears into the sidelines to make way for such lowbrow and superfluous obstacles to the criminals' scheme as a young woman's ass, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and a cat with a penchant for severed fingers. Because of its uncomfortable mixture of the loopy and the lame (and excepting Roger Deakins' typically gorgeous cinematography), "The Ladykillers" plays like so many of the Coens' movies do: as if they were putting on a skit for a small group of people with somewhat crude, somewhat silly, somewhat cynical tastes that run exactly with their own. It reminds me why I don't count myself in that number.

Copyright © 2004 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.