Does anyone beside me feel almost as if Tom Hanks' hilarious performance comes from a better movie than this and stands out here like gold in a dung heap? Every time I try to enjoy the film I'm annoyed by everything other than his performance in it and if not for his presence I'd write off the film entirely. It'd be like "The Big Lebowski" if everyone other than Jeff Bridges sucked in it!
"Be nice until it's time to NOT be nice."
I THINK THIS WHOLE MOVIE IS GREAT, LOOK AT ME SHOUTING MY OPINION ON THE INTERNET TOO!!!
shareThe Painting on the wall stole the show. The rest was pretty Meh. Tom Hanks dialogue was too hard to understand half the time. The music was annoying (just my preference). The old lady kept reminding me of OJ Simpson.
shareNaw, the Vietnamese "General" was the best part of the movie. The scene of him protecting his donut shop was the best thing in the movie!
shareIt remains a bizarre aspect of Tom Hanks career that he ended up starring in "the worst Coen brothers movie ever made"(I strongly disagree) and has made no other Coen brothers movies since. Hanks has joked about it,saying that the Coens avoid him on the street and haven't offered him a single script since.
But this was a GREAT role for Hanks(in an era when he wasn't getting many.) It was certainly a real change of pace for Hanks -- he plays a villain with a willingness at the end to "kill an old lady" either via proxies(the other gang members, drawing straws) or (at the end) being quite willing to kill her himself. Hanks is funny in The Ladykillers -- but he is also a murderous villain, worse in certain ways than his mob hitman in "Road to Perdition."
His overarticulate dialogue is very much in the Coen brothers tradition if you go by their dialogue for the characters in True Grit and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, in which the characters take so many ornate words to say anything that you are pleased and amused at the same time.
And Hanks even gets a chance -- about mid-movie -- to recite the Poetry of Edgar Allen Poe with the seriousness and commitment of a true Oscar winner.
Interesting: Hanks' slow-witted Southern accent in "Forrest Gump" helped win him an Oscar...and here he is doing a completely DIFFERENT -- and just as funny -- Southern accent in The Ladykillers. Professorial. More Louisiana than Alabama.
In homage to Alec Guiness's work in the original as the Professor -- Hanks, too wears some phony teeth. Actually Guiness's fake teeth were more overdone and fake; Hanks' set are a bit more sophisticated and funny.
Its too bad that "The Ladykillers' has such a bad rep. There's a lot to like in the film --the Vietnamese general, JK Simmons always saying "easiest thing in the world, no problem at all," -- even the odd juxtaposition of Hanks' elegant white southerner with Marlon Wayan's hard-talking young black man.