Herald rating: * * * *
Running time: 99 mins
Rental: Next Thursday
Review: Ewan McDonald
Something funny has happened to Bruce Willis in his last few movies. He's enjoying himself. People around him are enjoying themselves.
He's much better than he was for all those years when he was ... no, don't go
there.
In this black comedy, Willis plays Jimmy Tudeski, a hit man known in his professional circles as Jimmy the Tulip, who moves next door to the only poor dentist in Montreal, Oz Oseransky (Matthew Perry of Friends).
Willis relishes the opportunity to deliver lines like this one, his professional code: "It's not important how many people I kill. What's important is how I get along with the people who are still alive."
Oseransky's French-Canadian wife, Sophie (Rosanna Arquette), smokes cigarettes and wishes he were dead. Jill (Amanda Peet), Oz' dental assistant, reckons: "You'd be doing the world a favour if you just had her whacked."
Everybody is having everybody whacked. Jimmy the Tulip is being hunted by Janni Gogolak (Kevin Pollak), a Chicago gangster, who wants him whacked.
Sophie wants Oz to go to Chicago and rat on the Tulip for a payday.
Oz does not want to do this. But Sophie can be very persuasive, so he flies to Chicago where he's taken under the muscular arms of Janni's henchman, Frankie Figs (Michael Clarke Duncan, from The Green Mile, also out on video next weekend), and the sheets of the Tulip's wife, Cynthia (Natasha Henstridge).
Everyone flies back to Montreal and I'm not going to spoil the fun by telling who does what to whom.
Enough to say that, while it mightn't be the greatest comedy of all time, The Whole Nine Yards is a heckuva lot more laughs than most things you'll see on the box this month.
