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Ten Days Of The Coen Brothers: Day Eight Part One

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10 years ago

March 5, 2016

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Hanks But No Thanks

♦ With the release of Hail, Caesar! in the UK on 4 March, Tripwire kicks off a look at all of the Coen Brothers films released to date. Yesterday we took a look at their tenth film Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and now our editor-in-chief Joel Meadows takes a look at their eleventh movie The Ladykillers (2004) .

The Ladykillers

Director: Joel Coen

Stars: Tom Hanks, Irma P Hall, Marlon Wayans, JK Simmons, Tzi Ma, Ryan Hurst

Just a year after the failure that was Intolerable Cruelty, the Coens took another swerve in direction that turned out to be a mindless detour. After fifteen years of quality film-making, the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century had seen them hit a cinematic impasse with consecutive duds. The first was the aforementioned Intolerable Cruelty and the second, The Ladykillers. While perhaps The Coen Brothers should be applauded for trying something a little different, this remake of the classic Ealing comedy of the same name (no doubt obscure or unheard-of to American audiences), made back in 1955, simply didn’t gel.

This updating of the story sees the action shifting from London to the Deep South of the USA, where a gang of incompetent criminals, determined on robbing a gambling boat, fail to take into account the presence of canny landlady Marva Munson (Irma P Hall). The hapless thieves are led by Professor GH Dorr (Tom Hanks). Hanks is probably the best thing here as his turn as an oleaginous faux academic is fun to watch on screen, but the rest of the gang just don’t hit the mark. JK Simmons is presentable as the explosives expert with irritable bowel syndrome and suitably odd name, but the rest are fairly interchangeable.

In the original, we had a cast that included Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom and the incomparable Alec Guinness – a shady gathering of hardened spivs with real chemistry and authenticity to them. There was also a truly sinister ambience to the movie, thanks to the grimy, bombed-out locations picked by Ealing Studios, whereas the sunny climes of the American Deep South don’t adequately exude such urban gothic. The slapstick humour here falls pretty flat too, making some of the scenes rather excruciating to watch. Also, like Intolerable Cruelty, it doesn’t feel like a Coen Brothers film, although there are moments of sparkle and imagination.

The Ladykillers is a curio and a second stumbling block in a career that had been almost impeccable until 2003. It isn’t as reductive and lazy as Intolerable Cruelty, but it does seem as if the Coens were treading water here, floundering in unambitiously lightweight projects, and in serious need of some new source material that would provide focus and inspiration. Thankfully, they found just that in their next effort, No Country For Old Men.

JOEL MEADOWS