THE WHOLE NINE YARDS
STARRING: Bruce Willis, Matthew Perry, Rosanna Arquette, Michael Clarke Duncan, Natasha Henstridge, Amanda Peet, Kevin Pollak DIRECTOR: Jonathan Lynn WRITTEN BY: Mitchell Kapner
As creator of the British TV series "Yes, Minister" and the writer/director of movie comedies like Clue, Nuns on the Run, and My Cousin Vinny, Jonathan Lynn isn't lacking in the offbeat humor department. With The Whole Nine Yards, he shows a considerably darker side to his sense of what's funny; this time there are contract killers, murder plots and double-crosses to go with the pratfalls and silly accents that characterized earlier Lynn films. Picture an Elmore Leonard novel filtered through a Brit-com sensibility, and you get the idea. While the film begins unpromisingly, it kicks into an entirely more satisfying gear in its second half, giving Matthew Perry the distinction of having the best Friends cast member movie thus far.
Perry stars as Nick "Oz" Oseransky, a dentist who's distinctly unhappy with his mooching French-Canadian wife (played with a silly accent by Arquette) and unfulfilled life. After recognizing his new next-door neighbor Jimmy Jones (Willis) as notorious hit man Jimmy "The Tulip" Tudeski, Oz is forced by his wife to go to Chicago in hopes of collecting a reward for revealing Tudeski's whereabouts to Yanni Gogolack (Pollak), the crime boss Tudeski sold out for a reduced sentence. Naturally, assorted hijinks ensue, including but not limited to Oz's getting worked over by Gogolack's enforcer Frankie Figs (The Green Mile's Duncan), sleeping with Tudeski's wife (Henstridge), and finding out about a particularly large sum of money that everyone wants to "off" everyone else for. Oz learns that Tudeski doesn't believe in divorce (it's a sin), but would happily kill his wife to get at the money. As he becomes a pawn in the schemes of everyone around him, Oz has to figure out a way to keep the people he cares about from getting whacked-- especially himself.
At first, laughs don't come easily. Perry seems unsure whether to go with his sarcastic wiseacre character on Friends or the bumbling, in-over-his-head naïf Lynn seems to want. Worse, he looks embarrassed at having to perform the too-numerous pratfalls that mar the entire movie. Pollak, doing an even more silly accent than Arquette's, tries to make his pronunciation of "vermin" this year's version of Joe Pesci's "yoots" in Vinny but fails horribly. By the second half, though, after a few more characters have been established (particularly Jill, Oz's dental secretary and contract killer wannabe, played with fervid enthusiasm by Peet), the humor starts to click. Willis' friendship with Duncan is so patently obvious that it shines right through their line readings, and Perry seems to relax into a much better mix of peevish tightass and nice-guy hero. Even the sight gags are funnier. In the end, everything works out in a twisted yet moralistic way that Jimmy the Tulip would appreciate.
GRADE: ***
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