Tom Hanks' Forgotten 2004 Crime Thriller Is The Rare Coen Brothers Misfire

The early 2000s were a dark time for the Coen Bros. They had risen to fame in the mid-1980s with their unique crime films like "Blood Simple" and "Raising Arizona," and hit their stride in the 1990s with films like "Miller's Crossing" and "Barton Fink." They crested in the popular consciousness when they released "Fargo" in 1996, a film that was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and which made over $60 million on its $7 million budget. They chased it with the soon-to-be cult movie "The Big Lebowski," and their 2001 film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" was also a hit, with a soundtrack that won a Grammy for Album of the Year. 

But then the Coens churned out a one-two-three punch of awkward bombs that almost spelled out career doom for the filmmakers. Their film noir "The Man Who Wasn't There" (which just joined the Criterion Collection) was oblique and laconic, and their divorce lawyer comedy "Intolerable Cruelty" was seemingly a misguided stab at going Hollywood. The Coens seemed to have passed beyond the pale with their 2004 film "The Ladykillers," a remake of the 1955 Ealing Studios comedy with Alec Guinness. "The Ladykillers," while sporting a fun leading performance from Tom Hanks, lacked the sharp wit and acidic irony of the Coens' earlier outings, not to mention failing to live up to the 1955 original. It also wasn't a gigantic hit, leading one to ponder if the Coens were about to pass from relevancy entirely. 

The Coen surged back in 2007 with "No Country for Old Men," which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, so they recovered nicely. But for a while, it looked like "The Ladykillers" was the end of the road for the duo. It was really quite mediocre.  

"The Ladykillers" follows the adventures of Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr, Ph.D (Hanks), who claims to be a professor of classics. He is, in fact, a professional thief and is only posing as a professor so that he can peacefully move into the basement of the devout Christian woman Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall). Once there, Goldthwaite brings in his "band," actually his team of heist experts, to tunnel through Ms. Munson's basement wall into the vault of a nearby casino. The team consists of a tunnel expert (Tzi Ma), a munitions guy (J.K. Simmons), a dim bulb muscle man (Ryan Hurst), and the casino's mouthy inside man (Marlon Wayans). 

It's worth pausing to note that each one of the cast members plays a broad, almost cartoonish character. Only Hall plays her character as somewhat realistic. Hanks especially hams it up as Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr, affecting a Foghorn Leghorn voice and a Colonel Sanders aesthetic. He can never be accused of not being wholly devoted to this role. Simmons is especially funny as a character named Garth Pancake, who bickers well with the Wayans character, Gawain, and who has to pause in the middle of tense situations to take care of his irritable bowel syndrome. Wayans, meanwhile, feels like he tripped in from another film, bringing a different kind of comedic energy than the Coens typically depict. 

Early in the film, Dorr and his team actually pull off the heist, but Ms. Munson catches them red-handed. She insists they give the money back and go to church to redeem themselves. The team, instead, plots to murder her, hence the title. Will these cartoon scoundrels have the wherewithal to murder an elderly Christian woman with righteous morals?

It's hard to see what the Coens were doing with their remake of "The Ladykillers." While most of their previous movies had been dark crime films, often with a comically sardonic edge, "The Ladykillers" was the Coens' full turn into slapstick territory. None of their other films are quite this silly, quite this broad (although "Raising Arizona" comes close). If they had hired a mainstream Hollywood cinematographer to jack up the lighting and brighten up the tone, "The Ladykillers" would be indistinguishable from most studio comedy flicks. 

Critics weren't terribly kind to "The Ladykillers." It has a 54% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes (based on 198 reviews), and even the positive critics seem to agree that it's largely insubstantial. Roger Ebert gave the film only two-and-a-half stars, writing that the main characters are all "comic strip oddities." Ebert also didn't like the forced dialogue. "There are too many moments," he wrote, "where dialogue seems so unmatched to the characters that they seem to be victims of a drive-by ventriloquist." Even /Film ranked it as one of the Coens' very worst. 

The film passed from memory pretty quickly, lumped — just as I did above — with the Coen Bros. previous two failures. It felt like a trifling experiment of masterful filmmakers whose heads weren't in the game. It seems that the Coens had to regroup a little bit, and got back on their feet with some short films before moving to their next feature. They contributed a segment to the Parisian love story 2006 "Paris, J'taime," and another to the Cannes anniversary film "Chacun Son Cinéma." By 2007, they found Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," and got right back on track.