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The Ladykillers Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: R (for language, including sexual references) Theater release: March 26, 2004 by Touchstone Pictures Directed by: Joel & Ethan Coen Runtime: 1 hour 44 minutes Cast: Tom Hanks (Professor G.H. Dorr), Irma P. Hall (Marva Munson), Marlon Wayans (Gawain MacSam), J.K. Simmons (Garth Pancake), Tzi Ma (The General) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

This is not the first time moviegoers have seen Tom Hanks secretly tunnel through the earth beneath a stranger's house. In 1989's The 'Burbs, a subversive comedy about eccentric criminals in a friendly suburban neighborhood, he dug his way right into an explosion that rocked the neighborhood. It happens again here, in The Ladykillers—which happens to be a subversive comedy about eccentric criminals in a friendly Bible Belt neighborhood.

But that's where the resemblances between The Ladykillers and other Tom Hanks comedies stop.

Tom Hanks and Marlon Wayans

In fact, Hanks' first outing with the notoriously odd moviemaking team of Joel and Ethan Coen buttons him into a character quite unique in his repertoire—a malevolent villain. Professor G.H. Dorr is a criminal mastermind who dresses as if he has been around since the mid-1800s. He speaks with a stiff Southern accent that renders almost unintelligible his verbose and archaic grandiloquence, a style of speech that suggests he was raised on nothing but Edgar Allen Poe. Dorr fancies himself as sophisticated and highly educated, but at heart he's as rotten and empty-headed as the rest of the Coen Brothers' big screen thieves. His method is to organize a team of "experts" who will carry out the hard work of the crime while he rocks back in a chair and quotes poetry or, when things go wrong, mutters things like, "How very irregular."

Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall), Dorr's latest target, is a no-nonsense Southern Baptist widow who isn't about to let the house of her deceased husband be tarnished by tenants who smoke cigarettes—or who listen to that awful "hippity-hop music." When she's not knitting and talking to her husband's rather expressive portrait, she's down at the local police station reporting complaints about local hooligans. Clearly, Dorr is in for a tough time.

But Dorr has chosen Marva's house for its proximity to his goal. He deceives her into renting him the empty room upstairs. Once he gains her confidence, he and his team go to work downstairs in the root cellar. She's convinced that he is rehearsing with an ensemble ("on-SOM-bluh") of musicians specializing in "music of the rococo." To pull off this ruse, Dorr masks the sounds of their tunneling efforts with recordings of classical music. While Marva smiles and knits to the reverberations from a boom box below ground, they dig their way to the underground cash vault of a nearby steamboat casino.

Meanwhile, Dorr's man on the inside (Marlon Wayans), posing as a steamboat janitor, tries not to arouse the suspicion of his disgruntled boss. The chameleonic Steven Root, also appearing unrecognizably in this week's Kevin Smith film Jersey Girl, fills the role that is present in every Coen Brothers film: the powerful and corrupt authority sitting behind a desk.

It seems like a foolproof plan. But moviegoers know that fools of the Coen Brothers' variety are the most spectacular fools of all. Remember the escaped convicts robbing a bank in Raising Arizona with a stolen baby in tow? The crooks who made memorable use of a wood chipper in Fargo? Or the fellow who mistook his pistol for an inhaler in Intolerable Cruelty? That must have been what attracted the Coens to do a remake—their first—of this dark, twisted, 1955 British comedy by William Rose. If The Ladykillers is about anything, it is about fools digging their own graves.

Marlon Wayans and J.K. Simmons

As funny as it is, The Ladykillers has an air of desperation about it. The Coens seem to have lost control of their signature qualities. They're increasingly willing to settle for sophomoric, predictable, and downright crass comedy. The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and Intolerable Cruelty went for lowbrow laughs as well, but the characters eventually won our sympathies. Here, the Coens spend each scene straining for laughs with limited success, content merely to exploit the stupidity of their characters to the point of absurdity. The film's biggest laugh is just a variation on an accidental death that occurred at the end of their last film. Sure, the movie's a laugh riot, very likely to be a big hit. In fact, it's funnier than any comedy released so far this year. But the Coens have shown many times that they are capable of something far richer and more memorable.

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