hile I saw and enjoyed this film in the theater, I didn't write a full review at the time. Therefore the introduction and scoring on this one was done months afterwards, when I prepared this reviews page in July 2004, and the material below the review and below the date is what I wrote about the movie at the time.

I really didn't know what to expect going into this one. The trailers made it look interesting and potentially very funny, but it also looked very unusual, and I could see it being brilliantly funny, or a complete train wreck. As it turned out it was somewhere in the middle, but much more enjoyable than I might have expected. In addition, the farcical nature of it lead to some very confused critics, which lead to some very amusing blog entries as I analyzed their perplexity.

First off, my review score.

The Ladykillers, 2004
Script/Story: 8
Acting/Casting: 8
Action: 6
Humor: 8
Eye Candy: 4
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 6
Overall: 7

It's been a few months since I saw it, and I remember it more warmly now than I did immediately after seeing it. Various bits of dialogue and scenes of completely absurdity come readily to mind, and I realize that I would enjoy seeing it again. I have thus adjusted my initial replayability score upwards.

March 27, 2004

Malaya and I saw Ladykillers Friday night, but I'm not going to write a long review about it.  I normally do, even for films that are clearly not worth the trouble, but I don't really have that much to say about this one. It stars Tom Hanks, and everyone loves him, and it's directed by the occasionally-brilliant Coen Brothers, but despite that it's not getting very good reviews. It was below a "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes all week, though as I look now it's up to 60%, with 65 out of 108 reviews positive, and 60% is their bare minimum for a fresh/recommend. There will probably be another 40 or 50 reviews added over the weekend, so it might improve or decline again.

I was somewhat put off by the reviews, since most of the negative ones say it's not very funny and full of overly-broad caricatures. I still wanted to see it though, and Malaya did as well, so off we went and caught a 5:40 show that was nearly sold out.  Matinee prices too, so we got in for $5.75 a head, rather than the usual $9.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. Not outstanding, not one I want to own on DVD, but it was a good time and I'm glad I went. I'd give it 3.5/4 stars, but since so much of the humor was based on surprise physical actions and events, I don't think it would hold up very well to repeated viewings.  I'm not entirely sure why so many critics don't like it, since I thought it was a very good, if silly, comedy. There was loud, constant laughter in the nearly-full theater we saw it in, at least.

Ebert didn't like it enough to recommend it, giving it a 2.5/4 star rating. His problem, as I divine it from reading his review, is that he applied too much logic to what is essentially a ridiculous, comic strip-styled movie. Every character in it is an intentionally-absurd, broadly-drawn stereotype who exists almost entirely for comedic value. If you take it seriously you'll spend the entire movie thinking, "No one would really do that.  No one acts like that." That's true, and that's one way to approach it, but it will make for a pretty disappointing movie-going experience.

I'm usually pretty nit picky and unforgiving of absurdities in film, but that's mostly in physical actions and plot developments, when they are just there to explain a crappy story or lazy direction.  If the hero is somehow able to run 50 yards in 2 seconds to avoid an explosion he should have died in, that takes me out of the movie since it's obviously impossible. But when a comedic character in a comedy does something funny that a real person wouldn't do, it's part of the comedy.  If no one ever did anything normal people don't do in film, we wouldn't laugh very much. Ebert sums up the principles pretty well.

The other crooks represent the extremes of available casting choices; all of them, like the professor, are over-the-top in a way rarely seen outside Looney Tunes. Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans) is a trash-talking hip-hop janitor at the casino; Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons) is a mustachioed explosives expert who asphyxiates a dog in an unfortunate gas mask experiment; the General (Tzi Ma) is a chain-smoker who once apparently specialized in tunnels for the Viet Cong, and Lump (Ryan Hurst) is a dimwitted muscle man who will do the hard labor.

My willingness to play along with the silly movie doesn't mean I'll accept every manner of lunatic behavior so long as it's in a comedy, but there wasn't anything in this film that I found impossible to suspend with my disbelief balloon.  The same isn't true of Ebert, who is also burdened by comparing this modern film to the original, that he and about 7 other people on earth have actually seen.  Guess what; the old one is much more subtle.  Big surprise there.

What the movie finally lacks, I think, is modesty. The original "Ladykillers" was one of a group of small, inspired comedies made at the low-rent Ealing Studios near London, where Guinness was the resident genius; his other titles from the period include "Kind Hearts and Coronets" (1949), "The Lavender Hill Mob" (1950) and "The Man in the White Suit" (1951). These were self-effacing films; much of their humor grew out of the contrast between nefarious schemes and low-key, almost apologetic behavior.

The Coens' "Ladykillers," on the other hand, is always wildly signaling for us to notice it. Not content to be funny, it wants to be FUNNY! Have you ever noticed that the more a comedian wears funny hats, the less funny he is? The old and new "Ladykillers" play like a contest between Buster Keaton and Soupy Sales.

Since no one reading this has seen the original, I say go see the new one and laugh a lot.  And no, it's not sublimely subtle and understated, but if it were 94% of critics would find it boring and pointless, and it would make about $7 at the box office.  As I'm sure Ebert realizes, though he's not going to point it out since it would cut into his argument.

April 6, 2004

I never got around to posting the following in a daily blog, but here's a little story and an email I sent to a movie critic a week or so after seeing Ladykillers. In response to this (I think) very misguided review of Ladykillers, I was moved to actually email the author. His review says things like this:

To make matters worse, the acting is just god-awful. The actors involved in this train wreck have given much better performances and in much better movies. Marlon Wayans as the homeboy Gawain MacSam plays into the stereotype of the bling-bling gangsta type who can barely utter a coherent sentence. J.K. Simmons (TV's Law and Order) is Garth Pancake, the explosives expert with IBS. Tzi Ma, who was outstanding in The Quiet American, is the General, a martial arts expert whose primary role is to endlessly repeat a running gag with his cigarette. Ryan Hurst (Remember the Titans) is Lump -- his name says it all.

But the worst performances and roles are reserved for the two leads Hanks and Hall. Hanks plays Dorr as if he were channeling Truman Capote and Joseph Cotten giving a fractured interpretation of Colonel Sanders. In a word, it's an acting travesty. Hall's performance is less an outright disaster but is so clichéd and stereotypical that it borders on the offensive. That it is rendered in such a manically dull way just blunts and negates it. We're sort of hoping that she gets bumped off just to end the agony of the entire enterprise.

Which make it sound as though he completely missed the fact that this was a comedy, rather than a drama. The performances were supposed to be ridiculously stereotypical and outrageous, and I thought Hanks' work in the movie was brilliant, as were most of his lines. Great writing and dialogue and delivery of dozens of impossibly-complicated and lengthy lines of dialogue, all crammed full of multi-syllabic utterances and extremely complicated sentence structure.

Anyway, my mail to the clueless critic is reprinted here.  I did not receive any reply.

Regarding your review of Ladykillers, which I saw posted on the box office mojo site. I certainly wouldn't argue that it's a great film, but a D? Your comments on it seemed very misguided, as you spent most of the review criticizing the comedic elements of the film for not being dramatically convincing. Of course all of the criminals, not to mention the not-so-little old lady, are ridiculous stereotypes. That's the whole point. It's a comedy, and in this comedy the joke is that they are so broad and absurd and cartoonish.

Now it's certainly open to debate whether or not this is funny, since humor is entirely subjective. But your review seems to criticize the movie for accidentally doing what it clearly does on purpose. Ebert didn't think it was funny or compelling either, and he spent most of his review (pointlessly) comparing it to the original film (that I suspect about .05% of the US population has actually seen), but he at least acknowledged that he got the joke; he just didn't appreciate it.

If your review had pointed out that they were all exaggerated caricatures, and said that you didn't care for it, I think readers would be more likely to take your comments seriously, rather than just wondering if you somehow didn't grasp that it was sarcasm and comedy, rather than drama.

I didn't mention it in my own brief review, but on the way out of the theater my girlfriend and I passed a couple of women who were talking about the movie, and one of them said, "I didn't care for it. Jocks aren't really that stupid."

We (my girlfriend and I) traded a look and started laughing like hyenas, astonished that an educated adult could sit through the entire movie and come away so clueless. And I hate to say it, but I had the same reaction after reading your review, which seemed so earnest in its incomprehension.

Cheers.

Flux
blackchampagne.com

Funny how a mail I thought was relatively sincere and just slightly teasing reads so much snarkier and smugger now. Also, that anecdote we supposedly overheard on the way out of the theater is partially fictional, though I did hear a few confused people making complaints more or less along those lines.

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