The Ladykillers (2004) review

Dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★½

Devout fans of the Coen brothers will note a particular peculiarity with The Ladykillers. Unlike their previous features, which were directed by Joel and produced by Ethan, the filmmaking brothers share directorial credits on this flick; they would continue this unified ownership of their films going forward. I haven’t been able to find a reason why this is. It’s more of a footnote for the longtime duo, much like The Ladykillers itself.

The film is a remake of the 1955 British Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness, Cecil Parker, Peter Sellers, Danny Green, Herbert Lom, and Jack Warner. You would be forgiven if you forgot it was a Coen brothers movie, or if you forgot it existed all together. It’s not hard to see how its reputation is a mix of indifference or outright dismissal. The Ladykillers flirts with being hilarious. It comes so very close at times. However, too many things reel it backwards, be them one-too-many gospel concerts or dialog that flows between wryly humorous to overwrought and verbose.

The Coens transport the story from London to the tiny town of Saucier, Mississippi, which hosts a riverboat casino nearby. Enter silver-tongued smoothie Professor G. H. Dorr (Tom Hanks), who arrives on the doorstep of an elderly widow named Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall). He sweet-talks her into letting him rent the room she has available, along with using her root cellar as “a rehearsal studio” for his “Renaissance band” to practice.

I employ quotations because all that jazz is an elaborate farce. Dorr intends to rob the riverboat blind, and he has a diverse assortment of rejects to help him in his pursuits: there’s Garth (J. K. Simmons), an explosives expert; MacSam (Marlon Wayans), a foul-mouthed janitor who works on the riverboat; The General (Tzi Ma), a stoic killer with tunneling experience in the Vietcong; and Lump (Ryan Hurst), a dimwitted football player who wouldn’t make a UFL practice squad.

Sweet little Marva’s cushy southern estate is the perfect home-base for their robbery, for Dorr’s plan involves tunneling a great distance from her root cellar to the walls of the underground count-room of the casino. During their planning and excavating, the quintet play old-timey music on a boombox to fool Marva, and then grab prop instruments when they hear her heading for the cellar stairs. It’s a fun con to watch play out, if you can tolerate the pace.

The Coens spend roughly 30 minutes establishing Dorr’s initial meeting with Marva, the character introductions, and the blueprints of the heist. During this time, much of the talking is done by Dorr, and the filmmakers, known for their quirky dialog and eccentric characters, might’ve colored a little too far outside the lines with their professor archetype. Hanks is dressed like Colonel Sanders, and is privy to long, dizzying word salad filled with more adjectives than your average Emily Dickinson poem. At about the 45-minute mark, the Dorr character starts to exhaust, not because Hanks himself is insufficient, but because too much oxygen was devoted to the ringleader while the other broadly drawn motley crewmembers are left fighting for witty lines, and ultimately, significance.

Simmons and Wayans are the standouts amongst the robbers, even if Wayans feels like he was plucked from one of his movies alongside his brother Shawn. He’s the fish-out-of-water in a movie where everyone might as well be a squirrel in an aquarium. He doesn’t speak nor operate like anyone else, his loose cannon edge sometimes a distraction, as funny as his act so often is. Irma P. Hall — who is still with us in 2024, blessed so, at 89-years-old — turns in the film’s best performance. She’s a sweet old firecracker, who we gage early on knows she’s being taken for a ride by Professor Dorr, but lets him stick around because he even she herself is curious to see how far things will go.

Fans of British comic stylings, such as myself, will delight in how The Ladykillers hybridizes rather elegant, mannered dialog with the screwiest of circumstances. Yet it always seems like the Coens undercut the interpersonal possibilities of their cast or stall the pace with scenes of Marva attending a gospel sermon at her church. The film is rife with gospel needle-drops that set the mood themselves. The church montages don’t contribute to the narrative, but instead, worse, prompt a tune-out factor for a roughly 100-minute movie that moves at a turtle’s pace.

By definition, The Ladykillers is a remake. Its depiction of godless and amoral men being ill-equipped to deal with sincere spirituality when faced with it is a tried and true breeding ground for comic possibilities. There’s grounds to assume that it’s the kind of uniquely compelling story that loans itself to an update every three-or-four decades with a contemporary bunch of actors. Nothing is sacred in Hollywood these days. I hold out hope another talented filmmaker takes a crack at William Rose’s original story, starring a gaggle of actors we haven’t even been introduced to yet.

Starring: Tom Hanks, Irma P. Hall, J. K. Simmons, Marlon Wayans, Tzi Ma, Ryan Hurst, and Diane Delano. Directed by: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen.