Movie Scene
Thornton steals the spotlight in 'Bandits'

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

BANDITS (Rated PG-13 with violence, profanity, innuendo) Three Stars (Good) Barry Levinson's loopy, likable, but overly long crime comedy, with Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton as Joe and Terry, escaped felons who rob banks, and Cate Blanchett as a bored housewife who goes along for the ride, and falls in love with both men. MGM, 125 mins.

Their modus operandi is to come into a town, select a bank, discover the identity of the bank manager, visit the manager's house in the evening, hold him and his family hostage overnight, and then go with the manager to the bank first thing in the morning.

That way, the manager can open the building and the safe before the start of the business day.

After several successful raids, Joe and Terry become mythologized as "The Sleepover Bandits."

They're funny and fun-loving. They take a relatively non-violent approach to bank robbery. And they eventually fall for the same woman.

Thus, the film's goal becomes fairly obvious: To update the merry mood of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" to the modern era.

Like "Butch Cassidy," "Bandits" spotlights two wacky best-friend bandits who are attached at the hip despite their wildly different personalities.

Joe (Willis) is a soft-spoken but determined man of action. He gets the job done. Terry (Thornton) is a brilliant, but skittish hypochondriac. He comes up with the ideas, but often trips or sneezes his way through them.

And, as in "Butch Cassidy," the outlaws put themselves in league with an attractive, wacky woman, which leads to an uncomfortable three-way love affair.

She's Kate (Cate Blanchett), a disgruntled housewife who's tired of being ignored by her fool of a husband.

When she nearly runs over a fleeing Terry with her car, she gives him a lift, Soon, she's on the lam with two bank robbers, filling her previously empty life with adventure and passion.

Of course, when she finds herself falling in love with both men, life gets complicated again.

Screenwriter Harley Peyton (of "Less Than Zero" and TV's "Twin Peaks") populates his script with wonderful characters.

As brought to life by Thornton, Terry is a bona fide original. He's smart, nervous, and eager, but with a sweet, good-natured side.

He's more shocked to find himself loved by the beautiful Kate than by any of his wild criminal activities with Joe. But he's also hysterically prone to assuming he has every illness and disease available, and that the world is a germ-laden death trap.

Thornton is a vibrant character actor who revels in complexity and eccentricity, and is clearly having a ball in "Bandits."

Kate is also a gem of a character, a complex, under-appreciated woman who finally finds happiness in high-risk crime capers. And she's memorably played by the remarkable Blanchett, who delivers the most consistent and believable American accent I can recall hearing from a non-American actor. (She's Australian.)

Peyton and Levinson don't stop there. Several supporting characters also entertain — from the would-be Hollywood stunt man (Troy Garity) who drives the gang's getaway car to the various bank managers, who all have distinctive, funny traits.

Only Joe (Willis) is under-defined, in part because his character is a quiet, man of action. Compared to the wonderfully eccentric Terry and Kate, he's a blank page. Willis does what he can, but he has far less to play with than Thornton and Blanchett.

"Bandits" presses its luck with more than two hours of running time, thanks to the film's unnecessary framing device. The story is told largely in flashback, with narration and interviews, conducted by the host (Bobby Slayton) of a TV crime show in the "America's Most Wanted" mold. A straight-ahead narrative without that overview might have resulted in a leaner, more effective and efficient film.