Review of The Ladykillers (2004) by Jesse O — 17 Jan 2016

You know that saying about pizza, even when it's bad it's still pretty good. I guess you could say the same for the Coens because, honestly, out of all of their films I've seen, this might be the 'worst' one of them.

I still haven't watched their entire filmography. But, even with the fact that it's not the Coens at their best, this still ends up being a perfectly enjoyable movie. Stylistically speaking, this is still very much a Coen brothers film.

The characters are idiosyncratic and the dialogue is, typically, top-notch. Which is why it's really disappointing that the film's elements never really come together as effectively as one would think they should given all the talent on board in front of and behind the cameras.

The cast is top-notch, with Tom Hanks being a really inspired casting choice for the lead as he clearly relished the chance to play a different character than he would normally play. GH is a character that would say just about anything to get his way, he's well-spoken and educated and he uses that to his advantage.

He's an anachronism, he looks and sounds more like an old plantation owner more than anything else. The character is well-written and he's, clearly, the most memorable and entertaining part of the film.

The rest of the cast, with the exception Irma P. Hall as Marva, while really good, don't really get as much to do or are as interesting GH ends up being. I don't wanna say they're one-dimensional, but they're there because this is a caper movie, after all, and you know different people with different sets of skills.

The interplay between the cast is quite good and that's a pretty big part of why the film ends up being as fun as it is. As far as Coens' films go, this is probably one of their more easily accessible and digestible, at least out of the ones I've seen, I know Intolerable Cruelty is a little more mainstream than this, this is still rated R after all, but I don't think that's where the problems of the films lie.

Again, the story just doesn't really click as well, I didn't really care for the caper part of the story itself, they just don't do a good job at getting you intrigued about it. You're interesting in where it's heading after the fact, you don't really care about the planning of it and the caper itself.

You could also blame the fact that this is a remake, but I wouldn't use that, because the film does still feel like a Coen movie. It's got all the trademarks, so I don't know what you can blame it on.

Mid-career slump? Who knows, but their next film after this was No Country For Old Men, one of the best movies of the 2000s. True Grit, which I thought was excellent, was another remake. So if anything is to blame for this film not being up to Coen brothers' usually lofty standards, it might've been a slump they were going through.

Even with that, I still enjoyed this movie quite a bit. Good cast and good dialogue help overcome the planning of the caper and the caper itself just not being that exciting to follow and the characters, minus GH and Marva, not being developed as well.

Still, if you have Netflix, and you want something that'll keep you entertained for a relatively short time, then this movie is perfectly solid for that. It's not one of the Coens' best efforts but, by that standard, if Uwe Boll directed this movie then it would be his best movie, so that tells you something about how great the Coens are and how bad Boll is.