Seven Oaks Magazine.

The Coen brothers have been making films for nearly two decades, garnering a considerable legion of diehard fans that ensure that all their entries are at least modest hits, despite the quality of their films running the gamut from unwatchable to underrated to transcendent. Coen fans revel in the worlds the cerebral brothers create for them, delighting at the signposts they put up for them along the way. Animal abuse, the non-cinematic, realistic physics of accidents and injury, references to the actors' other work and see-them-coming-from-a-mile-away accidental deaths are but a few elements of a typical Coen brothers' movie. But amidst these winks to the audience is the work of serious, relevant filmmakers.

The Coens unashamedly celebrate and aggrandize American culture and sense of place, using it to enhance stories that convey and explore love, betrayal and ambition. Their dialogue exaggerates and plays with regional idiom, resulting in a poetry that is splendid, and splendidly American in nature. They are careful directors, weaving cinematography and music into their stories, eliciting a familiarity from their predominantly North American audiences. The results are sometimes excellent ( Fargo, The Man Who Wasn't There ), sometimes awful ( Raising Arizona , Barton Fink ) or sometimes undervalued ( The Big Lebowski upon initial release).

Their new film, The Ladykillers , falls well short of excellent, but saves itself from total disappointment because of the appeal of its aesthetic and remarkable performances from its leads. The Ladykillers is a remake of a 1955 British heist-comedy that starred Alec Guiness and Peter Sellers. Tom Hanks plays Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Phd., a classics professor on sabbatical in a small Mississippi delta town, where he rents a room from widowed, Southern crone Marva Munson, played by Irma P. Hall. What Marva doesn't know is that the rehearsals G.H. is playing with his "Ren-nay-ah-sonce en-saam-bull-ah" in the basement are actually a cover for a tunnel they are digging to the vaults of the Bandit Queen, the local floating casino.

His team is made up of a tunnel expert, the ex-North Vietnamese general (Tzi Ma), the knowledgeable but inept technical expert Garth (J.K. Simmons), the mindless 'blunt instrument', football lineman Lump (Ryan Hurst), and the lippy, gangsta-wannabe, inside man Gawain (Marlon Wayans). All of these characters sound like caricatures for good reason: they are blatantly so.

The film is little more than the trials of their rather simple heist. The group encounters obstacles, and the open conflict that ensues is sometimes good comedy. The scathing, leave-no-one-behind social commentary from these scenes - for instance, the patronizing Northerner explaining to the unruly, ungrateful Southern black how the former marched for civil rights, making fools of them both - is another Coen trademark that is hit with a lazy, idle regularity. Even the promise of rousing musical asides, suggested by the presence of O Brother Where Art Thou? executive musical producer T-Bone Burnett and gospel songs in the trailer, fails to materialize. Instead, the film is distracted by the strong personalities and characters in its cast, and for this reason it never truly works.

Tom Hanks' G.H. Dorr is a cross between Edgar Allen Poe and Colonel Sanders, a syrupy, charming, bizarre Southern know-it-all academic who ornaments his speech with rhyme and rhythm, and delivers it so dreamily, so lucidly that it approaches the sublime. Hanks is given a dense jungle of words and allusions to force out, and gets through it marvelously. Couple this with Hank's appearance and manner, and one cannot help but stare. His rendition of Shakespeare's St. Crispin's day speech by way of Walker Percy, along with his unexpected poetry recital for the ladies from Marva's church is enthralling simply because of its delivery, let alone content. It is so good that it is disconcerting. This is true for all the characters; laughter doesn't come from dialogue or action, but from the quirkiness of the characters.

The Coen brothers have filed a mediocre entry into their enviable canon. It suffers from a weak, quick, all-too-tidy ending, unfortunately a common trademark of the brothers' films. The Ladykillers is much more enjoyable than it has any business being, but that doesn't make it a good film. It seems less a movie than just another episode of the Coens' giant television series, in that it celebrates the expected standard peculiarities of their characters, their usual settings and celebrated myth over the requirements of a good story.