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The Ladykillers

BY JOHN ANDERSON | Staff Writer

When Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D. ( Tom Hanks, left), concocts the plot for the perfect heist, he rents a room from unsuspecting church lady Mrs. Munson (Irma P. Hall, right), in the hilarious comedy, "Ladykillers." (AP Photo)

(R) Interminable remake of the 1955 Alec Guinness-Peter Sellers lark, about a hapless band of thieves who need to kill their landlady, the flaw in their perfect crime. The Coens crash and burn. With Tom Hanks, Marlon Wayans, J.K. Simmons, Irma P. Hall, Tzi Ma, Ryan Hurst. Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. 1:44 (vulgarity, adult content). At area theaters.

To call the original "Ladykillers" a typical Ealing Studios comedy -- meaning breezy, concise and genteelly demented -- is to understate the qualities of the Ealing comedy. But it was all those things -- replete with a toothy Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers in his first film role.

One can understand Joel and Ethan Coen's impulse to remake the celebrated English film, which involved a motley band of professional criminals, their holdup of an armored car and the meddlesome landlady who upset their scheme. The Coens, after all, haven't made anybody laugh out loud in some time, and neither has Tom Hanks -- who, we perhaps need to remember, started out in TV's "Bosom Buddies" and whose early features were films like "Splash."

But "The Ladykillers" a la the Coens has as much in common with the original as "O Brother, Where Art Thou" did with the Odyssey (that film's reputed inspiration). "The Ladykillers" has its demented aspects, but they're hardly genteel; the movie is anything but concise, and Hanks is only fascinating because you can't quite believe he's doing what he's doing.

What is he doing? Playing Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, PhD, a felonious operator with a lexicon as long-winded as his name, who rents a room from the formidable Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall), an upstanding member of her tiny southern town and a woman of indomitable spiritual fortitude. He needs a place for his "band" to rehearse; Marva's root cellar is just the place.

While the Coens seem to find inherent mirth in a churchgoing, hat-wearing, flowered dress-filling black woman (who, in one of the film's several repetitious gags, regularly sends money to the racist Bob Jones University), Marva is a bafflingly wrong-headed character, at least for this story. The original's Katie Johnson played a daffy pest whom the local constabulary thought was a kook. Hall is terrific, but Marva Munson is anything but crazy. So the film's payoff (those who don't know the story will have to guess) simply doesn't make any sense.

But then, neither do most of the "improvements" that the Coens inflict on Alexander MacKendrick's original. Moving the story to the American South provides the Coens with another opportunity for their not-quite-good-natured brand of regional ridicule (see "Fargo's" Minnesotans, for instance), and the strategy of providing backstory on each of the gang members -- who include an explosives technician (J.K. Simmons), a tunneling expert from "French Indo-China" (Tzi Ma), the "muscle" (Ryan Hurst) and the so-called "inside man" (Marlon Wayans) is pointless. Had they all simply walked into a room, the viewer would have known who and what they were. All the prelude simply prolongs the agony.

Unlike the '55 film, in which the gang ambushed a bank delivery and had Johnson's character pick up the money (thus implicating her in the crime), the Coens' band of idiots are tunneling from Marva's basement to the headquarters of a local casino. (How convenient that a woman with a room to let would also be on a direct line to the ... oh, never mind). Like the original, Hanks' character is the most educated of the group, with prosthetic teeth and an inflated sense of self. But his performance is forced and simply overdone -- which makes it consistent, at least, with the rest of "The Ladykillers."