The Whole Ten Yards Review
by Karina Montgomery (karina AT cinerina DOT com)April 22nd, 2004
Whole Ten Yards, The
Network Premiere
Some of you might have skipped the Whole Nine Yards, thinking Matthew Perry and Bruce Willis would not a funny movie make. Well, that is certainly your loss. My companion and I watched Nine Yards before slipping out to catch Ten Yards, and we still laughed out loud most of the film. It was with high hopes that we trooped into our seats to watch the Whole Ten Yards. Unfortunately, although our lads still have that old time chemistry, and Amanda Peet is still goofily amusing, this film just lacks the wit and the pizazz of the first one.
Not only is it preferable to watch Nine before Ten, it is necessary; the film requires a lot of sense of these characters, because right off the bat we have to accept that they are behaving out of character. Everyone is being weird and illogical, and it's not confusing so much as tiresome. Perry seems at first to be the only actor from the first movie who watched his previous work so he could be consistent with the previous film. Kevin Pollack returns playing his deceased character's father, and if anything is weirder and crazier (but at least less annoying) than he was in Nine. He's just not enough to make up for the absence of Rosanna Arquette and Michael Clarke Duncan. The story is just complex enough, as well as the long set up wherein we realize that there are all kinds of layers of trouble in paradise, that the film has to dispense with the comedy just to get all the information across. The Whole Nine Yards had just as much information, as well as comedy and character development, so I don't see why this one would have gone so terribly awry.
It is fortunate for Peet and Natasha Henstridge that they get to be a little more than boobie presenters and placeholders, but again, their characters got all the development they were gonna get in the first movie; now it's just action action action. The action is fun, and there is some comedy, but some movies should never have a sequel. Like Legally Blonde 2, this sequel puts an undeserved stain on the original film, one that worked to defeat the high level of preconceived notions moviegoers had about seeing it. Ten Yards is nowhere near as insulting or unfunny as Legally Blonde 2, but I was sad to see Perry add another movie to his "witless entertainment" column and not to his "career advancement" column.
One might make the assumption that Nine Yard's writer's Mitchell Kapner's characters had merely been purloined by a greedy studio system to make a buck off the affection folks like myself have for the first film. Again, a parallel with Legally Blonde 1 and 2. We loved the people from the first film, and we want to know how they are doing, maybe recapture some of that magic again. However, unlike Elle Woods' character, the same writer that created our hapless team of comic co-conspirators originally has now put them through their new adventure. Perhaps he knew them too intimately to care about making them make sense to the rest of us; maybe he really thought they could be in that caper movie he never got to produce, and this was a compromise. Be that as it may, don't compromise yourself or your happy memories of the Whole Nine Yards by seeing this one.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These reviews (c) 2004 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. You can check out previous reviews at:
http://www.cinerina.com and http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the Online Film Critics Society
http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/listing.hsbr - Hollywood Stock Exchange Brokerage Resource
An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark -- that is a critical genius. -Billy Wilder
More on 'The Whole Ten Yards'...
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
