The Ladykillers

Coen Brothers

Touchstone

Tom Hanks

Marlon Wayans

“The Ladykillers,” directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen (“O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “Intolerable Cruelty”), is a witty and satirical comedy that shows what can happen when an honest, old woman stands in the way of a group of dishonest men who are involved in a grand robbery scheme.

The group includes experts in explosives and tunneling, a muscle man and the critical “inside man,” and they have gathered to pull off a great casino robbery via a tunnel dug from an unsuspecting gospel women’s root cellar.

The group is made up of a wordy professor (Tom Hanks), a general (Tzi Ma), a not-so mechanically inclined props designer (J.K. Simmons), who says that every trying project is the “easiest thing in the world,” a foul-mouth hoodlum (Marlon Wayans) and a dumb football player, (Ryan Hurst). They basically follow the negative stereotypical characteristics that come with their titles.

The professor, Goldthwait Higginson Dorr III, Ph.D., devises the creative plan to construct a tunnel to the casino vault to acquire all the monetary treasure that it houses. He has a perfect olde English dialect and a gasping laugh akin to an obnoxious snorting, that he uses to charm the old ladies including the important Mrs. Munson (Irma P. Hall) whose house is the key to the entire robbery.

The plan is covered by the clever ruse that the men are renaissance musicians, church musicians at that, to satisfy Mrs. Munson, and they are in dire need of a space to practice in. Mrs. Munson’s root cellar is tested with a series of odd vocal calls, done by the professor, to ensure that it has the best acoustics, but what he really wants to find out is if the walls are sufficient enough for the tunnel.

Mrs. Munson knits, attends church regularly, enjoys gospel music, baking and talking to her dead husband’s portrait. She nags the sheriff with minor complaints and asks that he conduct the mundane tasks of telling her neighbor to quit playing his “hippity hop” music so loud because it does not have the wholesome quality of church music and regularly getting her cat, Pickles, who steals every scene he is in, out of a tree.

The men underestimate the curiosity of this woman. She frequently intrudes on their “practicing” to indulge them with some of her cinnamon cookies. As she walks down the stairs, the men quickly cover their work on the tunnel and grab up their instruments as if they were children quickly hiding their wrongdoing to avoid getting in trouble.

They begin to run into a plethora of problems as it is slowly realized that the men lack the mental capacity to complete the tasks they were assigned and Mrs. Munson becomes suspicious of the activities in her root cellar. She ultimately finds out what they are up to after a series of explosions occur in her home and the professor can no longer convince her that nothing is going on. He tries to convince her that stealing the money was a good thing to do and that a portion of it is intended for donation to her favorite bible school, Bob Jones University. He makes it seem like a minuscule amount that they have taken and she eventually agrees that it was a good idea, that is until her husband’s portrait reveals a disapproving glare and she quickly tells the professor to return the money and that group will have to attend church with her or else she will turn them in.

The professor, unwilling to give up, decides that the busybody woman has to be killed. They are wrong once again as Mrs. Munson seems to crimp their plans again.

At first the film seems to be scattered, as there are all these choppy introductions of each of the characters without any connections made between them until quite far into the film. By the time the group finally gathers for their first meeting, it is difficult to associate which character came from what situation. It is hard to stay interested at first, but the film quickly recovers with the stunning performance of Tom Hanks and the amazing dark humor of the Coen Brothers.