Rent The Ladykillers (2004)

Purrrrrrfect - The Ladykillers review by CP Customer

A superb update of the original Ealing classic.

Worth watching for the 'Slap Reel' alone. Superb! Another Coen Classic watch out for Mr Pickles.

An atrocious, desperate, unfunny & strangely boring film. How this got made is beyond me - The Ladykillers review by TB

The Ealing comedies are held in reverence by critics & viewers alike. In particular, The Ladykillers, starring A-list actors including Alec Guinness & Peter Sellers, is not only loved but also frequently appears on the Best Films Ever Made lists. I have not seen the film, but knew the premise of it. So when the Coen Brothers announced they were doing a remake with Tom Hanks as the lead, people were excited. I myself watched it purely because of the trailer, which was brilliantly edited & portrayed it as a screwball comedy with a towering central performance by Irma P. Hall.

But this film is genuinely terrible, as in, really bad in pretty much every way you can imagine. It's boring, monotonous, meandering, mostly badly acted (thank god for Hall, the only one who comes out with a shred of credibility, but even she can't save it from 1 star ignominy,) and just totally misjudges the tone.

Take Tom Hanks, the loveable Everyman who has rescued many a movie from mediocreness. In this, he plays a conman/leader of a gang who is planning to commit a heist. His character has two personas: sneaky/scheming or doddery old man when he is confronted by Hall's landlady. Neither is believable and you just sit there watching Hanks ham his heart out on trying to breathe a flicker of life into the leaden material, getting more bored by the minute.

Marlon Wayans fares even worse. His character, a completely foul-mouthed janitor & the "inside man" of the operation, is just written as a dialogue-spraying wannabe gangster whose sole purpose is to rant & swear repeatedly. And yes, whilst it is extremely funny when Hall's character hears him swearing & slaps him repeatedly (yes, those were real slaps done over multiple takes,) that is probably a minute combined of the film & the only thing that is memorable in what is just an unbelievably tedious watch.

You have the other stock characters (the extremely thick henchman, the explosives expert who in this case has IBS which conveniently strikes at just the wrong time ect,) who are so badly written & so unconvincingly played that you find yourself wondering why no-one from the cast or production just stopped everything and said aloud "What the hell are we doing? This is rubbish!"

Finally as an amusing side note, in the UK there was a minor news story about how a large group of OAP's who were huge fans of the original film went to a cinema to watch this version. Apparently, they all stormed out en masse part-way through due to the repeated swearing. However, nowhere was the quality of the film mentioned. As much as repeated profanity is boring & tedious, I would be much more annoyed at having to sit through a film which was barrel-scrapingly bad & I had paid to watch...