The Whole Nine Yards (2000) Reviewed by Eugene Novikov http://www.ultimate-movie.com Member: Online Film Critics Society
Starring Matthew Perry, Bruce Willis, Rosanna Arquette, Michael Clarke Duncan, Natasha Henstrige, Toni Colette. Directed by Jonathan Lynn. Rated R.
The Whole Nine Yards is a sublime semi-romantic caper comedy, cartoonishly convoluted but (more or less) consistently hilarious. Aside from a rare comedic performance by Bruce Willis, this is mostly stuff we've seen before. But director Jonathan Lynn, who literally cut- and-pasted the premise from his own 1992 hit My Cousin Vinny into the 1997 comedy Trial and Error and made it work, has a flair for bringing old ideas into a fresh light. The secret to this movie's success isn't the plot, which is contrived and rather absurd, but likable performances and a funny, energetic script.
Friends's Matthew Perry plays Nick Ozaransky, a very unhappily married dentist living in Quebec. One day Nick realizes that the person who just moved in next door to him is actually Jimmy "The Tulip" Tudeski (Willis), a notorious contract killer. Jimmy has a price on his head himself: Chicago gangster Yanni Gogolack (Kevin Pollack) wants Jimmy dead for killing his father. Nick's antichrist of a wife ships him off to Chicago to rat Jimmy out to Yanni and collect the finder's fee.
In Chicago, Nick meets up with Frankie Figs (The Green Mile's Michael Clarke Duncan), an associate of Yanni. He is instructed to go back to Canada with Frankie and help kill Tudeski. But The Tulip has plans of his own. You see, Nick's wife wants Nick dead so she looks around for a good hit man; in the process, she tells Jimmy what Nick is doing in Chicago. When Gogolack and his gang arrive, Jimmy will be waiting.
But of course a movie like this would not be complete without a love subplot so Nick falls for Jimmy's wife. The kicker is that Jimmy, his wife, and Yanni have a collective 10 million dollars lying in a bank. To claim the money, they need the signatures of the three people, two signatures and a death certificate or one signature and two death certificates. Thus, Jimmy wants to kill both Yanni and his wife, claiming all the money for himself. Lovesick Nick can't let that happen, of course, but can he really do anything about it?
There's a whole lot going on here, even more than I cared to explain, and not all of it makes sense. But The Whole Nine Yards tackles its plot with such unapologetically cheerful gusto that you can't help but like it. It's hard to tell whether the film is aware of its own absurdity and is winking slyly as it takes its goofy script and runs with it or whether it has no idea and just doesn't care but I'm leaning towards the latter. It never seems to flinch, back away or make excuses; it just romps its way through the story.
Matthew Perry has made a career of always playing the straight man, the one person remaining rational when everyone around him goes loony. He's done it in his tv show, the underrated 1999 movie Three To Tango and is continuing that trend here. I never seem to get sick of his sarcastic, cynical style; the actor can do more with subtle gestures and facial expressions than some comedians can with a rubber face or a script full of monologues. His masterful comic delivery can make even slightly lame one-liners riotous.
Playing alongside Perry is Bruce Willis, an actor not known to do comic roles which is a shame. His performance here is superior to almost any given pre-Sixth Sense role he's taken. Willis's Jimmy Tudeski is the polar opposite of Perry's Nick, a wry, smug, almost omnipotent criminal ready to kill at the blink of an eye and Willis plays him perfectly, often underplaying scenes thereby making his character creepily volatile as well as funny.
There's a scene in The Whole Nine Yards in which Willis and Perry are standing on a moving boat. Perry is astonished about something that I will not reveal and the unperturbed Willis throws him a beer. Perry is far too ruffled to catch it and the beer flies on by and off the boat. A lesser movie might have lingered on this admittedly funny gag and killed the joke. But without so much as a pause, The Whole Nine Yards just continues on its merry way.
Grade: B+
©2000 Eugene Novikov
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews