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Part of the problem is that the focus of the film is too much on Dorr, not enough on Marva. The great Alec Guinness played Dorr in the original Ladykillers with a sort of perverse glee. He was a thoughtful over-polite fellow who, when others looked away, betrayed his sinister intent with a ghastly smile. That version of the villain was just creepy enough to make us squirm and laugh in discomfort. Hanks' Dorr is plenty creepy, but he is more annoying than unsettling. Unlike George Clooney's wacky divorce lawyer in Intolerable Cruelty, who grew and changed, there is no heart under Hanks' heavy burden of behaviors. He remains opaque, merely odd, never endearing. Are we supposed to hope for his success? His redemption? His destruction?

It's not Hanks' fault. Like Clooney, Nicolas Cage, John Goodman, Frances McDormand, and Billy Bob Thornton before him, he masters his character's inane dialect and adds another unforgettable performance to the great Coen pantheon. But the Coens fail to find a character in Dorr's mess of characteristics. Worse, they misgauge our tolerance for his spasmodic laughter and impenetrable verbiage.

Dorr's four companions fare no better. Each one is a cliché with an added twist, a forced joke with an extra punchline. Gawain MacSam (Wayans) is a gun-happy gangsta with a fixation on 'booty' and a mouth that's fouler than perhaps any Coen character yet. This brand of humor clashes with the Coens' more sophisticated style, aiming to please baser appetites. It's juvenile and wearying.

You could call Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons of Spider-man) "the Dunce of Detonators." He's an explosives expert with a rather explosive physical condition that is sure to cause a crisis at the worst possible time. This will get big laughs … from those who think high school locker room humor is funny.

The General (Tzi Ma)—a much more interesting and amusing invention—is a Japanese assassin, a man of few words … especially when he's trying to hide a burning cigarette in his mouth. The film's best-choreographed catastrophe occurs when his stealth fails him in the middle of murderous stalking.

Dumbest of them all, Lump (Ryan Hurst) is a world champion of village idiots, a football player who takes orders as the team's "blunt instrument," so long as his conscience remains shell-shocked by gridiron collisions.

These losers never achieve the chemistry that characterized the bowling buffoons in The Big Lebowski and the sensitive crooks in Raising Arizona. They're so ill-equipped for heist work that the movie becomes merely a question of how spectacularly they will fail. Call it Oceans Zero.

Irma P. Hall and Tzi Ma

Three things make the film worth catching: music, cinematography, and Irma P. Hall.

Hall walks away with the movie. As the well-intentioned but gullible widow, she delivers a heart-and-soul performance that you've gotta love. While she's misguided in her desire to invest all of her assets in Bob Jones University—one of the film's best running gags—her knack for detecting lies and stopping wrongdoers in their tracks makes her the center of the film.

Her church choir does its part to redeem moviegoers' time as well, stirring up foot-stompin', hand-clappin', hallelujah-shoutin' soul. From the opening hymn to the closing-credit anthem, these roof-raising hymns and anthems spell out the film's obvious moral framework. "Go Back to God" is the exhortation in the opening hymn, sung like a dire warning to the cretins invading this church lady's house. And sure enough, as the thieves ignore the path of righteousness, their sins are found out.

But the most masterful work in the film is the cinematography of Roger Deakins, who has become the most trustworthy member of the Coens' team. In relocating The Ladykillers from London to the Bible Belt, he finds opportunity to compose some of his finest tableaus. From the polish of the steamboat brass to the murky Mississippi, from Marva's dank root cellar to the tree-lined streetscapes of the Louisiana neighborhood, Deakins offers imagery worthy of a far better film.

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