Coen brothers deliver another offbeat, comedic gem

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

THE LADYKILLERS (R) Four Stars (Excellent) Tom Hanks is a Southern professor who leads an oddball gang in a robbery attempt, all from the fruit cellar of an amiable but suspecting landlady (Irma P. Hall). Also stars Marlon Wayans, J.K. Simmons. Directed by Joel and Ethan Cohen. Touchstone, 104 minutes.

And who better to do the job than brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, the brilliant creators of "Fargo" and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

In the original, Alec Guinness stars as a robbery mastermind, disguised as a milquetoast musicologist. He rents a room in a boarding house next door to a bank and invites his cohorts to join him in the basement, supposedly to practice ensemble classical music. In truth, they're digging underground to rob the bank. (The gang includes the young Peter Sellers in his first significant role.)

Here the Coens shift the action to the deep South, with Tom Hanks as Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, a so-called literary professor who's more like a Kentucky colonel with delusions of intellectual grandeur.

He rents a room from Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall), a hospitable, gospel-loving landlady.

They're in a town along the Mississippi River, and Dorr has targeted a casino vault alongside the river. He and his cohorts will dig from Miss Munson's fruit cellar to the wealth beyond. As in the original film, he tells Miss Munson that he and his friends are practicing for a concert.

His gang includes a hard-working digger and detail man (J.K. Simmons) who suffers from irritable bowel syndrome at the most inopportune times; a former Vietnamese general and munitions expert (Tzi Ma), a dim-witted football player (Ryan Hurst) who performs muscle functions, and a wise-cracking "inside man" (Marlon Wayans) who uses his job as a casino maintenance man to get information and plot routes. All four have funny moments, particularly Wayans and Simmons.

Hall ("Soul Food") is also wonderful as the stately, God-fearing Miss Munson, the type of woman who marches down to the local police station to report youngsters who drive through her neighborhood with loud rap music blaring from their car radios.

She prefers righteous gospel music, which gives the Coens just the right incentive to provide another great music score to rival their "O Brother" outing.

But it's Hanks who anchors "The Ladykillers" with his hilarious renderings of the ornate Southern phrasing and Edgar Allen Poe quotations that the Coen brothers put into his mouth. For added punctuation, there's a lavish overbite and eyelids that occasionally blink far too rapidly. It could all careen madly out of control, except Hanks is such a disciplined master; he takes his caricature to the limit — but never beyond.

After the atypically mundane "Intolerable Cruelty," the Coens are back on track with another offbeat comedic gem. These guys are such eccentric originals, they even make this remake seem like it was their idea in the first place.

Rated R, with strong profanity, comic violence.