Bandits Review
by David N. Butterworth (dnb AT dca DOT net)October 16th, 2001
BANDITS
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 2001 David N. Butterworth
** (out of ****)
Somewhere within the scattershot confines of Barry Levinson's "Bandits" lies a halfway decent movie struggling to get out.
There's probably not a whole lot wrong with the film that a decent editor couldn't fix (cutter Stu Linder appears *not* to be it). It's got a cute premise, likable stars, and the potential for many laughs along the way. But director Levinson seems to have asked Mr. Linder to make sure that every frame of available footage--funny or not, relevant or not, good, bad, and indifferent (or not)--wound up in the finished film. And to heck with continuity: just throw it together in any old order!
"Bandits," then, is a caper comedy starring Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett that flashes back early and often. Joseph Blake and Terry Lee Collins are "America's Most Wanted," lovable Robin Hood-style bank robbers known as "The Sleepover Bandits" by virtue of the fact that they hold a bank manager hostage the night before a heist. What I could never figure out is why they hang around for the tellers to show up the next morning but I'm sure that's one of the many plot details I missed during this unnecessarily frenetic and surprisingly clumsy movie.
There are scenes in "Bandits" that'll leave you scratching your head in bewilderment. Like when Blanchett, as a frustrated housewife who winds up on the lam with Joe and Terry and cannot chose between them, starts spontaneously lip-synching to a Bonnie Tyler hit while preparing a gourmet dinner for her unappreciative husband early in the film--where did *that* come from you ask? And then the puzzlingly brief montage of her and Bruce Willis's character cavorting on the beach with those Polaroid snapshots thrown in to accentuate the positive--what was *that* all about you wonder? And the soundtrack: one cringe-worthy pop song after another!
It's as if Levinson deliberately wanted to cram as many clichés into the film's overly long two hours as he (or his screenwriter Harley Peyton) could, not to mention every available style of filmmaking. Even the film's tag line, "Two's Company. Three's a Crime," reeks of the overused.
Willis and Thornton have a pretty nice chemistry, though. Joe (Willis), the charmer, has long hair; Terry (played by the ever-changing Thornton), the brains, has short hair. They might be likened to Bonnie and Clyde on the syndicated TV show that follows (and exploits) their exploits, but with their seemingly bottomless grab bag of bad wigs and outrageous disguises, Joe and Terry more often resemble Sonny and Cher. By contrast, Blanchett's performance is closer to overwrought than impassioned.
I take back what I said about the editing of this film (although when separating the wheat from the chaff one typically tends to keep the wheat!). There's probably not a whole lot wrong with "Bandits" that a decent *director* couldn't fix. Levinson used to be a decent director ("Diner," "Tin Men," "Rain Man," "Bugsy"), but recently he's been all over the map, quality-wise, with as many uncomfortable shifts in genre in the last ten years ("Jimmy Hollywood," "Sleepers," "Sphere," "An Everlasting Piece") as Leelee Sobieksi has had openings in the last ten days.
There's a germ of a fine film in "Bandits," some decent ideas and a few genuine laughs, but nobody took the time to develop these comic situations into anything beyond obligatory. Don't go expecting another "Get Shorty" that's for sure. In contrast to that film's smart, sharp dialogue and dynamite performances, "Bandits" feels labored and haphazard, a big in-joke where the joke, unfortunately, is on us.
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David N. Butterworth
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