Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #233087 in DVD
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English, Vietnamese
• Running time: 104 minutes

Amazon.com
If you've never enjoyed Alec Guinness in the classic 1955 British comedy that inspired it, the Coen brothers' remake of The Ladykillers may well prove hilarious. For starters, it's got Tom Hanks in a variation of the Guinness role, eccentrically channeling Colonel Sanders, Tennessee Williams, and Edgar Allan Poe in his southern-fried performance as Prof. Goldthwait Higgins Dorr, Ph.D. (named after an actual arts institute curator from the Coens' native Minnesota), a deliciously verbose con man who needs a secret headquarters for his five-man plot to rob a riverboat casino moored on the Mississippi. In the film's funniest and least-caricatured role (and even she can't elude the Coens' comedic stereotyping), Irma P. Hall plays the churchgoing widow who rents a room to Dorr, whose crew of "musicians" (in keeping with the original's plot) use the lady's root cellar to tunnel to the casino's cash-rich counting room. Rampant mishaps ensue, the body count rises among Dorr's band of idiots (including Marlon Wayans, spouting nonstop profanities), and the Coens put their uniquely stylish stamp on everything. It's a funny movie, allowing for some nagging flatness to the material, but if you've seen the original (and other vintage comedies from the heyday of Britain's low-budget Ealing Studios), you'll eventually wonder, what were they thinking? Accounting for all the qualities that grace any Coen movie (this being the first time the brothers have officially shared directorial credit), this revamped Ladykillers is a mixed blessing, both entertaining and superfluous. --Jeff Shannon

From The New Yorker
An elderly lady (Irma P. Hall) lives with her memories, her cat, and her scandalized view of youth. Into her life comes a courteous (and presumably bogus) professor (Tom Hanks), who needs a room to rent and a cellar in which to make sweet music. That, at any rate, is his excuse, his true intent being to tunnel through from below to the vault of a nearby cASINo. The plot will be familiar to anybody versed in Ealing comedy (the original movie, directed by Alexander Mackendrick, and graced with the same title, came out in 1955), but the existence of this new version is harder to explain. It was made by the Coen brothers, whose own taste for slight provincial surrealism veers close to that of Mackendrick, but, far from refining his work, they have devised one of their coarsest pictures to date. Its grasp of time and place is, by their standard, weirdly unstable, and the supporting players, among them Marlon Wayans, J. K. Simmons, and Ryan Hurst, cannot hope to match the fooling of Peter Sellers, Cecil Parker, and Herbert Lom in the earlier film. Hanks gives his all, but the movie deflates around him; there is even what one hesitates to call a running gag, based on irritable bowels. Is that what the creators of "Fargo" now consider funny? -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Leonard Maltin, HOT TICKET
"A laugh-out-loud movie that’s quintessential Coen Brothers."

Customer Reviews

Remake? Mainstream? So what - it is a great fun:
I could not stop laughing and enjoyed it tremendously. Tom Hanks was simply delightful pretending to be refined, highly educated, charmingly polite and smooth talking Rococo music lover Professor G.H.Darr who in reality was a very dangerous, ruthless and devious criminal that assembled the most hilarious gang of thieves (each has his special talent) to dig the tunnel through his landlady's root cellar to a casino vault and to steal 1.6 million dollars. As good as Hanks was, he was completely upstaged by Irma Hall who steals the movie as Marva. She received many awards for her acting and very deservingly. I know that many Coens' fans don't like The Ladykillers because
1. it is a remake of the 1955 movie with the same title and
2. because it is one of their most mainstream films.
I don't care - "The Ladykillers" has Coens' signatures all over - it is very funny, very dark, and uniquely beautiful visually - just remember the opening scene with two scary gargoyles and the garbage barge.

Entertainment AND Art
(...)For background:I have seen Ladykillers 3 times(...), I am not really a Coen Brothers fan, and I am not really a Tom Hanks fan. And even after all that, I still think that Ladykillers is the most well-thought out comedy in a long time. The factor that I most hate with comedies today, is that dialogue never seems to be a key factor, but rather someone falling on their a**. In Ladkillers, the dialogue of Tom Hanks' character is brilliant. Now, people who did not like the movie because of "sterotypical" characters, were most likely referring to Mr. Wayans character, who, to be honest, does follow suit of the overused violent, vulgar, "gangsta" black man archetype, though he is excellant at playing the character. The other stereotypical character is Lump, who is a overly moronic football player. Other than that, the story, characters, filmwork, dialogue, and most notably, the music are all brilliant and beautifully put together. Speaking of the music, I should point out that all the music is either gospel or gospel-like rap from the Nappy Roots, this is to match Ima P. Hall's character and the fact that the gang of thieves are posing as a gospel-inspired enemble. Please, for once, I'd like to see a GOOD comedy do well, not to insult American Pie and Eurotrip and Old School, etc (all of which I did enjoy), but di*k and fart jokes aren't what I consider "smart comedy", which is usually well-thought out comedy [ie Futurama and The Simpsons(even though I now hate The Simpsons]. Go see this, please. Cause, c'mon at least it's better than Zoolander or Johnson Family Vacation or You Got Served.

Not quite...
Well, it's got Tom Hanks in a marvelous performance as some kind of weird combination of Col. Sanders and Poe playing out his destiny as a gentlemanly con man set on robbing a casino located on a Mississippi riverboat. And it's got some entertaining sidekicks, esp Marlon Wayans as the foul-mouthed inside man who's a janitor in the casino. And it's got the Coen brothers, who are always wacky and rarely off base. And best of all it's got Irma P. Hall, the churchy widow who looks to her venerable deceased husband's portrait (and his facial expression keeps changing to suit the situation) for moral guidance in how to deal with Hanks and his sidekicks, who are digging a tunnel in her root cellar.
But somehow, it all falls a bit short and begins to feel superfluous, esp as the body count rises toward the end, and I found myself only smiling instead of laughing aloud. I was pretty much over it before the final credits rolled.