The Ladykillers

Reviewed by PETER CALDER

(Herald rating * * *)

A remake of one of the great classic comedies from the Ealing Studios, the newest film by the anarchist visionary brothers of American cinema has excited widespread critical hostility for failing to be either an Ealing comedy or a Coen brothers film.

There was no way it could or should have been the former, of course; but, though it never achieves the antic charm of O, Brother Where Art Thou, say, or the perfect black comic coherence of Fargo, it looks from the first frame and sounds from the first line like undiluted Coen.

Initially the boys were writers-for-hire and Barry Sonnenfeld, who shot the Coens' 80s films such as Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, was to have directed but when he begged off, the brothers decided to direct it themselves. And it has to be said it feels underworked at times and overwrought at others, as though they came to it late and underprepared.

But for all that it has an easy, loping rhythm, like a joke told by a campfire, and it's full of little pleasures, including almost vaudevillian set pieces, played a little (or a lot) larger than life-size.

The 1955 film's London bank robbers are now an unmistakably American ensemble, led by the refined Goldthwait Higginson Dorr PhD (Hanks), who looks like a lean Col Sanders with a Civil War cape and cane. His coruscating, polysyllabic utterances (a cat up a tree is a "fleeing feline") both bemuses and charms the bow-legged old black widow Marva Munson (Hall) in whose house he seeks to rent a room.

Ostensibly on sabbatical, he says he wants to use her cellar as a soundproof rehearsal space for the early Renaissance music group he leads. But this ensemble has other plans, namely tunnelling into the vault of the nearby casino.

The comedy that follows, as in the original, depends largely on the tension generated by the possibility the landlady will discover her tenants at work and the conflicts within the gang.

It is a splendidly baroque ensemble which is cleverly and economically name-checked in early sequences: Pancake (Simmons) is a safari-suited munitions whizz whose unflappable confidence conceals his ineptitude; Gawain (Wayans) is a dreadlocked gun-toting gangsta whose cleaning job in the casino makes him the inside man; meanwhile a mouth-breathing ex-footballer (Hurst), and an inscrutable Vietnamese (Tzi Ma) make up the group.

Fans of the delicately wrought original (which starred Alec Guinness and newcomer Peter Sellers) would do well to take note of Ethan Coen's observation in one interview that "the more genteel aspects of the movie kind of got trashed".

But it's fair to remember that this is not a 50s English comedy. It's the Coen brothers in pastiche mode, having the time of their lives. It's far from being their best film but it's much further from being the worst thing that's on at your local multiplex this weekend.

CAST: Tom Hanks, Irma P. Hall, Marlon Wayans, J.K. Simmons, Ryan Hurst, Tzi Ma, George Wallace

DIRECTORS: Joel and Ethan Coen

RUNNING TIME: 104 minutes

RATING: M, violence and offensive language

SCREENING: Village, Hoyts, Rialto, Berkeley, Bridgeway