Bandits Review
by Christopher Null (cnull AT mindspring DOT com)October 12th, 2001
BANDITS
A film review by Christopher Null
Copyright 2001 filmcritic.com
If you start a movie by telling people how it's going to end, well,
telling us how it gets there better be one hell of a good time. And to
be sure, Bandits begins with its ending, but the story leading up to the
dramatic finale is just about as lame as they come.
Doing time for unknown crimes, Joe (Bruce Willis) and Terry (Billy Bob
Thornton) are milling about the clink one day when our hunky inmate Joe
engineers a daring escape, taking his milquetoast pal Terry along for
the ride. Within a few nights on the lam, they've engineered a plan for
a new kind of bank robbery -- kidnap the bank manager at his home, spend
the night at his house, then waltz in with him first thing in the
morning and abscond with all the money.
The plan works so well as Joe and Terry rob their way from Oregon to
L.A. (en route to open a nightclub in Mexico, of course!) that they
become infamous as "The Sleepover Bandits." Through happenstance (and
of course it has to be through happenstance), the bandits end up with a
bored, rich housewife along for the ride. Kate (Cate Blanchett) ends up
stealing their hearts, and along with those go any semblance of
watchability that Bandits might have had.
Bandits wants to be Fargo -- a kitchy, light-hearted, and wryly funny
comedy set against the backdrop of a caper. Instead, Bandits is a messy
debacle of awful jokes, unbelievable romance, and a ploddingly obvious
storyline that feels even longer than its two-plus hours.
Bruce Willis can be fun, even in throwaway material like The Whole Nine
Yards, but Bandits puts his balding head in trashy long hair and tries
to convince us that he's some wonderstud that can charm ladies even when
he's holding them at gunpoint. On the flipside, Thornton's one-note
character (he's an obsessed hypochondriac that can actually delude
himself into paralysis) is sold as someone with whom Kate falls in love
simply because they both dislike black and white movies. But while
details like logic are glossed over, increasingly irrelevant director
Barry Levinson (Sphere, An Everlasting Piece, you get the picture...)
opts to spend long, pregnant moments developing irrelevant,
uninteresting storylines, the end result being one awfully boring movie.
In search of something positive to say, I'll acknowledge that at least
Bandits has a fair number of giggle-worthy moments, a tense dinner as
the kidnappers dine with a bank manager and his suburban family being
the comedy highlight of the movie. Too bad that's 30 minutes into the
picture -- and the film just heads south from there. The love triangle
wherein the guys agree to share the girl (a plot stolen from Splendor --
lame source material, in my opinion) isn't believable, and the robbery
scenes are barely suspenseful at all; in fact, the only real danger
arises when the criminals act with complete stupidity: joyriding on the
road or when the driver (the sleepy Troy Garity, a minor highlight in
this sea of boredom) leaves the waiting getaway car to chase a hot
chick. Uh huh.
It's amazing that seven producers were unable to figure out how to turn
a moderately promising premise into something worth watching. (Well,
not really.) The bottom line is that this is a Levinson vanity project,
pure and simple, and there's nothing uglier than vanity.
RATING: **
|------------------------------|
\ ***** Perfection \
\ **** Good, memorable film \
\ *** Average, hits and misses \
\ ** Sub-par on many levels \
\ * Unquestionably awful \
|------------------------------|
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Director: Barry Levinson
Producer: Ashok Amritraj, Michele Berk, Michael Birnbaum, David
Hoberman, Barry Levinson, Arnold Rifkin, Paula Weinstein
Writer: Harley Peyton
Starring: Bruce Willis, Cate Blanchett, Billy Bob Thornton, Troy Garity
http://www.mgm.com/bandits/
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