The Ladykillers film review

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THE LADYKILLERS

Combine the offbeat genius of the Coen Brothers with the two-time Academy Award winning acting chops of Tom Hanks and a remake of a classic Ealing comedy and voila, hilarity ensues. Right? Wrong. What little humour there is is generally of the vulgar and dumb variety, but mostly it's just absent. In its stead are banal exchanges, clichéd characters and pedestrian plotting. The only redeeming feature is Hanks who is deliciously melodramatic as the eloquently verbose criminal mastermind Professor G.H. Dorr.

Presumably the Coens were enamoured of the 1955 original, which is why they chose it as the subject of their first remake. But quite what it was they liked is hard to determine as they have captured little of its charm, wit and mischief. One obvious element they couldn't replicate was the brilliant cast of Alec Guinness, Herbert Lom and Peter Sellers. As good as Hanks is, he has little in the way of support, though in their defense the script does them few favours.

Essentially the Coens have remained loyal to the plot, which revolves around a band of incompetent crooks who rent a house to orchestrate a robbery while under the guise of being musicians. The only difference being the setting switch from London to Mississippi. What the Professor's plan hadn't taken into consideration, though, is the interference of the elderly landlady. Here again things have gone awry, this time in casting. Instead of the frail little figure of Katie Johnson, who played the original landlady, they have gone with the robust Irma P. Hall, who offers a far more formidable foe and in the process less opportunity for humour.

Inevitably, the quaint Britishness of the original needed some overhauling to appeal to a wider, American audience. It's just a shame the best way the Coens felt to do this was by adding the foul-mouthed Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans) and Garth Pancake (J. K. Simmons), a sergeant major-ish buffoon who suffers from irritable bowl syndrome. The rest of the crooks comprise the taciturn Vietnamese General (Tzi Ma) and the brainless Lump Hudson (Ryan Hurst) who between them muster about half a dozen lines, though, given what comes out of the other pair's mouths, silence is preferable.