Amazon.com
If you've never enjoyed Alec Guinness in the
classic 1955 British comedy that inspired it, the Coen brothers' remake of
The Ladykillers may well prove hilarious. For starters, it's got Tom Hanks in a variation of the Guinness role, eccentrically channeling Colonel Sanders, Tennessee Williams, and Edgar Allan Poe in his southern-fried performance as Prof. Goldthwait Higgins Dorr, Ph.D. (named after an actual arts institute curator from the Coens' native Minnesota), a deliciously verbose con man who needs a secret headquarters for his five-man plot to rob a riverboat casino moored on the Mississippi. In the film's funniest and least-caricatured role (and even she can't elude the Coens' comedic stereotyping), Irma P. Hall plays the churchgoing widow who rents a room to Dorr, whose crew of "musicians" (in keeping with the original's plot) use the lady's root cellar to tunnel to the casino's cash-rich counting room. Rampant mishaps ensue, the body count rises among Dorr's band of idiots (including Marlon Wayans, spouting nonstop profanities), and the Coens put their uniquely stylish stamp on everything. It's a funny movie, allowing for some nagging flatness to the material, but if you've seen the original (and other vintage comedies from the heyday of Britain's low-budget Ealing Studios), you'll eventually wonder,
what were they thinking? Accounting for all the qualities that grace any Coen movie (this being the first time the brothers have officially shared directorial credit), this revamped
Ladykillers is a mixed blessing, both entertaining and superfluous.
--Jeff Shannon
From The New Yorker
An elderly lady (Irma P. Hall) lives with her memories, her cat, and her scandalized view of youth. Into her life comes a courteous (and presumably bogus) professor (Tom Hanks), who needs a room to rent and a cellar in which to make sweet music. That, at any rate, is his excuse, his true intent being to tunnel through from below to the vault of a nearby cASINo. The plot will be familiar to anybody versed in Ealing comedy (the original movie, directed by Alexander Mackendrick, and graced with the same title, came out in 1955), but the existence of this new version is harder to explain. It was made by the Coen brothers, whose own taste for slight provincial surrealism veers close to that of Mackendrick, but, far from refining his work, they have devised one of their coarsest pictures to date. Its grasp of time and place is, by their standard, weirdly unstable, and the supporting players, among them Marlon Wayans, J. K. Simmons, and Ryan Hurst, cannot hope to match the fooling of Peter Sellers, Cecil Parker, and Herbert Lom in the earlier film. Hanks gives his all, but the movie deflates around him; there is even what one hesitates to call a running gag, based on irritable bowels. Is that what the creators of "Fargo" now consider funny? -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
See all Editorial Reviews
(104)
$10.49
(611)
$14.99
(16)
$36.99
