Review: Mob comedy 'The Whole Nine Yards' not a 10

February 28, 2000
Web posted at: 11:43 a.m. EST (1643 GMT)

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- Now that the major movie studios spend most of their free time looking over each other's shoulders, a certifiable film genre can be invented in a matter of months. Each studio is trying to beat its competitors to the punch, so everybody eventually winds up making the same damned movie. The main thing separating the recent mobster comedies "Analyze This," "Mickey Blue Eyes," and now Jonathan Lynn's "The Whole Nine Yards" -- which topped the box office this weekend, again -- is their titles. Any other differences are incidental.

Each film revolves around a regular guy (Matthew Perry in "The Whole Nine Yards") who suddenly finds himself mixed up with a violent mobster (Bruce Willis this time around). Most of the scenes consist of Joe Average turning into a mound of trembling Jell-O over his new friend's cold-hearted business tactics. Guns get waved, bodies drop and a nervous breakdown ensues.

The fun lies in watching an innocent person lose control of his bowels when someone gets shot or tossed through a window. If the screenwriter is a little bit ambitious (definitely not a given), the sadistic bad guy will also sport a self-deflating character quirk.

"The Whole Nine Yards" lies somewhere between the often hilarious "Analyze This" and its dreadful cousin, "Mickey Blue Eyes." It features a couple of entertaining performances, with Perry getting lots of mileage out of his gift for pratfalls. Lynn is hardly a master of high comedy, but he's got a decent sense of rhythm. He knows how to hang onto a joke, then let it fly when you least expect it. He made his name as a director with the popular Joe Pesci comedy, "My Cousin Vinny" (1992), and that just about sums up his filmmaking style. The movies he's made so far are intermittently amusing and almost wholly forgettable.

"The Whole Nine Yards" cruises along amiably enough before it burns out.

Perry plays Nicholas "Oz" Oseransky, a bored suburban dentist who nearly has a heart attack when he realizes that his new neighbor is a notorious former hit man, Jimmy "The Tulip" Tudeski. From a work standpoint, Willis seems to view Tudeski as an extended day at the beach. He doesn't inhabit the character so much as he visits him, inappropriately smirking through every scene like he can't believe he's getting away with it. It's a lazy, smug caricature, and Willis probably earned more than the gross national product of Guatemala to deliver it.

Oz and Jimmy quickly develop a totally unbelievable, awkward friendship. Then things start to get complicated, probably too complicated for such a light comedy.

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Oz's cruel French-Canadian wife, Sophie (Rosanna Arquette), may have the hots for Jimmy, and she eventually hires him to do some dirty work for her. Arquette's "French" accent, by the way, is enough to scrape paint off a wall. She sounds like she's playing a trapper in an Elmer Fudd cartoon.

Oz's sexy-cute dental assistant, Jill (Amanda Peet), is a fledgling hit person herself. She's a big fan of Jimmy's work, and it's not long before she's begging him for pointers on the fine art of snuffing people. Peet is very appealing; she has a spunky, funny screen presence. She's been in a handful of movies already, but this could be a breakthrough performance. Look for bigger and better things from her.

Screenwriter Mitchell Kapner keeps piling on wacky characters and unexpected double-crosses until you can't be concerned with anything but the punch lines.

Sophie eventually forces Oz to fly to Chicago to tell Jimmy's vengeful enemies where he's hiding out. She's hoping that there might be a "finder's fee" in it for them, but it turns out that she's setting up Oz to be killed.

The Chicago bad guys are a great deal funnier than Willis. They're written with an eye on overt comedy rather than simple intimidation, and the actors are committed to squeezing some laughs out of the material.

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"The Green Mile"'s Michael Clarke Duncan plays Frankie Figs, a monstrous mob enforcer who manages to seem gentle even while he's pounding the daylights out of people. He seems to have wandered over from Barry Sonnenfeld's "Get Shorty" (1995). His boss is a speech impediment-laden crime lord named Yanni Gogolak (Kevin Pollak). Yanni simply cannot pronounce his V's and W's, and Pollak plays the tongue-twisting for all it's worth. In fact, Yanni's name may actually be Johnny, but no one dares to say it that way around him. Who knows if it's intended as a gag, but hard-core NFL fans will also get a chuckle out of his last name: Pete and Charlie Gogolak were twin place kickers in the early 1970s.

The jokes fly fast and furious, but things bog down considerably when Oz meets and falls in love with Jimmy's wife, Cynthia, played by the almost absurdly statuesque Natasha Henstridge. Though she's turned into a dependable actress, Henstridge is nearly as intimidating as Duncan. She looks like she could kick Perry to death with her high heels. It doesn't matter, because the movie eventually falls apart, but their love scenes together are almost ludicrous. If Oz could get a woman like this to fall for him, bullets couldn't possibly stop him.

"The Whole Nine Yards" has moments of unexpected violence, and Peet strips down to absolutely nothing during a distasteful murder sequence. Such a gratuitous unveiling has to be embarrassing for a talented actress. Give the women a break, guys. Rated R. 99 minutes.

"The Whole Nine Yards" is a production of CNN Interactive sister company Warner Bros., a Time Warner property.

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Official 'The Whole Nine Yards' site
Warner Bros. Movies

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