The Ladykillers

my rating: Nathan's rating:

The Ladykillers seems to have something for everyone in it. Just not enough for me to satisfy me. It's as if it can't decide what kind of film to be (dark comedy, screwball laff-fest, ironic satire, etc), and instead mixes a bunch of it all together.

There's lots of carefully cinematic photography, with the square and flat framing of the sheriff's office against a blank sky, or the recurring shot of the criminals dropping... assorted items onto a garbage barge from the bridge, which ties in unexpectedly but delightfully at the end. And like O Brother, Where Art Thou?, there's plenty of authentic American folk music (this time of the gospel variety). Very artistic.

But in between there are gags about one of the characters having diarrhea, another getting slapped upside the head over and over, and another nearly swallowing the old lady's dentures. The characters are odd and interesting... at first. But they each turn out to be shallow caricatures: a ringleader with peculiar intellectual affectations, a stupid and childlike piece of muscle, a mysterious asian soldier, a colorful oversized boyscout, a funky foul-mouthed gangsta, and (their nemesis) a dotty gospel-loving old negress. The criminals don't belong together and only a line of dialog is wasted justifying their partnership. And the wacky hijinx as they play all off each other is predictable. There were times I thought I was watching one of the comedies I used to go to as a kid, starring Burt Reynolds and/or Don Knotts.

Nathan got lots of out-loud laughs from it, though they tended to be the bits I sat through with my eyes rolling. I chuckled at some of the clever lines given to the professor because he was the "smart" one of the bunch, and I appreciated the irony of the naive black woman making donations to racist Bob Jones University, because she thought it was a good Christian school. Maybe the bits I liked were brief enough to avoid boring Nathan, but the parts he liked were enough to let my mind wander to Smokey and the Bandit. It wasn't bad, but it was... disappointing.