The Ladykillers Review

by Jonathan Moya (jmoya AT cfl DOT rr DOT com)
April 7th, 2004

The Ladykillers

A movie review by Jonathan Moya

** (out of 5)

Professor G.H. Dorr: Tom Hanks
Marva Munson: Irma P. Hall
Gawain MacSam: Marlon Wayans
Garth Pancake: J.K. Simmons
The General: Tzi Ma
Lump: Ryan Hurst
Mountain Girl: Diane Delano

Touchstone Pictures presents a film written and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Based on the 1955 screenplay by William Rose. Running time: 104 minutes. Rated R (for language and sexual references).

The Ladykillers, the Coen brothers latest, is really more sequel than remake. It is Intolerable Cruelty 2-- twice as painful and awful as the George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Jones disaster that was the brother's previous film. Oh, brother what a mess this is!

Tom Hanks plays Goldwaith Higginson Dorr Ph.D, part Colonel Sanders who looks like he has been inhaling a little too many secret herbs and spices; part Rhett Butler gambler and oily Southern gallant with a $10 vocabulary that would trade for $1.56 in confederate notes if they had any value. This is Hanks giving comic evil a try, only to find it spittling gently out of the cracks of his mouth at the slightest hint of a satanic cackle. Something that Alec Guinness in the 1955 original made so blood simple with precision drolling gets remillered crossing the Atlantic into precious drooling.
There are some things the British should keep to themselves, because they are the only ones that can do it right. Ealing Studios, who made that marvelous 1955 original had the talents of not only Obiwan himself, but a pre-Pink Panther Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom, as well as a farrago of the best character actors ever assembled for dark and dirty comic do-do-ings. Only people who live in so much fog could produce something so deliciously black and eely.

The Coens have kept the basic plot: a criminal mastermind and his gang use an old woman as a ruse to pull the perfect caper only to be chud and suckered by the old dame and her proxy of animals- but flopped it to the Deep South town of Saucier, Mississippi and a scheme to barge a ton of skink from a riverboat casino.

It all sinks rather quickly into the deep mud of the Coen's overindulgence. Like raising the Arizona from the bottom of Pearl Harbor, The Ladykillers splits apart, the cast becoming quickly the men who never were there.
Hanks Professor Dorr finds his gang through a classified ad casting call. These are men known more for their willingness to fail gloriously in the mousetraps of their own inventions, men who are completely unprepared to the deal with the big and low boskiers of an old black woman's religious peccadilloes.

Lump is the dumb jock wide receiver who couldn't catch a pass if was stuck in his face mask. Garth Pancake is a munitions expert more inclined to blow off a thumb than produce a precisely timed explosion. The General is prone to get lost in a tunnel, and probably survived the Vietnam war because he could never find his way out of the dark. Gawain MacSam is the inside man who can't keep himself inside because he is always being fired. This is the usual gang of characters that couldn't shoot straight, think straight or be straight. Of course, they get the loot, and lose it and themselves in comic treachery.

The Coens have never traveled over the line of stereotype so extensively as they have here. MacSam is a hip-hop foul-mouthed counterbalance to Dorr's hyperbolic tongue. Even in a comedy that depends on recognition of type, the pairing of MacSam with Irma P. Hall's Marva Munson comes dangerously close to racial insult.

Hall is the only one in the cast not caught up in over-emoting. Blessed with the grace of sweet Jesus and a smiting backhand that can bring down "hippity-hoppers" and blasphemers alike, Hall with her stern line readings and her big woman sashay shows the two white boy directors how to do this right. Like the 87 year-old Katie Johnson dueling Alec Guinness to a draw in the Alexander Mackendrick directed original, Hall takes on Hanks and gives him a spanking. She proves that being yourself is the best way to act.
Unfortunately, Hall is just one third of the Ladykillers. The rest is quite deadly. All the tunnel digging from the house to the casino, the heist, the back stabbing and treachery are played out as dark farce without surprises. It dies because nothing or no one is capable of change. The repeated shots of dark objects and dark bodies being dropped from a bridge into a garbage scow passing underneath could easily be the Coen's vision going into the dumpster.

Copyright 2004 Jonathan Moya

http://www.jonathanmoya.com

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