Dir. Ethan and Joel Coen, 2004, USA, 104 mins
Cast: Tom Hanks, Irma P. Hall, Marlon Wayans, J.K. Simmons, Tzi Ma The Coen brothers have grown up. Actually scratch that - they haven't grown up, they've grown middle-aged and commercial, so much so that the image of them licking milky dollars from the teat of mainstream Hollywood makes more of a lasting impression than their latest movie offering. Admittedly they were halfway there with 2003's Clooney/Zeta Jones vehicle Intolerable Cruelty but they've certainly sealed the deal with what must be this year's most pointless remake, The Ladykillers - not so much O Brother, Where Art Thou? as O Coen Brothers, Why O Why? It seems that at the ages of 50 and 47 respectively, the Minnesotan-born Joel and Ethan Coen have unwisely decided to chop up, bury and concrete over their indie roots and start towing the party line by regurgitating bland and forgettable films which serve no other purpose than to shore up their pension funds and blot out the memory of their former cult status. As David Thomson of The Independent writes, "it's as if the job now strikes them as a habit". Gone are the cool young dudes responsible for Fargo, Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing and The Big Lebowski (movies which most sentient beings would have traded body parts, wives, husbands and souls to have made). In their place, or so it seems, are nothing more than the dry husks of one-time Kings of Indie, seemingly burnt out on the fire of impending middle-age and devoid of all the passion and desire for filmmaking they once had. A harsh judgement to bestow maybe but wait until you see the film . The Ladykillers makes a laboured attempt at rehashing the plot of the 1955 original and casts Hanks in the Alec Guinness role as shifty charlatan Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, who inveigles his way into the house and, most importantly, the root cellar of Hall's Mrs Munsen, a god-fearing, round and adipose cliché of a little old lady. The cellar, would you believe, is placed conveniently close to a local casino Dorr has plans to rob. Aided by a hotchpotch assortment of fellow cohorts (Wayans, Simmons, Hurst and Ma), assembled it seems more for paint-by-numbers 'comedic' purposes than for any actual criminal talent, Dorr uses the cellar to 'rehearse' church music whilst secretly tunnelling and exploding a route into the casino's vaults. Inevitably their hapless and nigh on cack-handed attempts to complete the heist arouse the suspicions of the not-so-oblivious Mrs Munsen, possibly because the plot is so thinly conceived that the lovechild of David Blunkett and Stevie Wonder could see the twists from space, and before the opening credits had even rolled. And which misguided fool decided it would be a good idea to cast Hanks in the lead role? Despite having garnered good reviews Stateside, Hanks plays Dorr as an unholy cross between Colonel Sanders and Will Self - all wordy verbosity, hokey Southern accent and Noel Edmonds facial hair. Hanks had a full year to develop the character or let it "simmer in the pot" as he puts it, which could account for the overdone characterisation and mannered performance Hanks actually delivers. It's not that Hanks is bad as such, it's just that the whole thing is so overly acted - it's like seeing the strings during a puppet show. You can almost see the nuts and bolts of how he brought the character together which, really, should be left to the inevitable 'Making Of.' featurette on the DVD. Hanks, however, is regarded as something of a Hollywood royalty by fawning, easily-pleased middle America so the likelihood of a negative review is as slim as Victoria Beckham. Much more impressive, for my money, are Wayans as Gawain MacSam (despite the fact that his boys-in-the-hood character seems to have wandered in off the set of another film), Simmons as Garth Pancake whose voice drips with fruity, rolling Beetlejuice-esque tones and Ma as the monosyllabic General. The same goes for Roger Deakins' beautifully mellow cinematography and, of course, the delicious names the Coens have seen fit to bestow on all the characters, names which almost deserve a "Services to the English Language" award of their own. Everything else about the movie, however, is so middle-of-the-road, so so-so , that it feels like there must have been a mistake on the credits. Surely this isn't a Coen brothers' film? Fortunately, in one sense, it's not. The Coens themselves refer to the film as just a "writing job", having originally planned to secure Barry Sonnenfeld in the director's chair. It seems that the Coens are long overdue a story of their own to really make a cinematic mark. Come on boys, quit with the remakes and rehashes of other peoples' scripts before your stars, so long in the ascendant, really do start to falter and wane. Joel Coen has apparently promised that "the next one we do will probably be from our own story and approached much more in the way we have approached our previous work" which kind of suggests he is embarrassed with the results of their latest venture. And if all that is just one last battle cry from two already fallen warriors then let's hope someone has the good sense to lock the errant brothers in a room and not let them out until they've written something on a par with The Big Lebowski. Come to think of it, how much is a flight to Minnesota .? Georgie Turnbull |
