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It wasn't long ago that the Coen brothers could do no wrong. From Fargo to The Big Lebowski to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, they entertained audiences and film critics alike with their playfully cynical take on American storytelling traditions. By combining witty, affected riffs of dialogue with off-beat characters and plotlines, the Coens created movies that made you laugh at first and think about later. Though The Man Who Wasn't There didn't have the same laugh-out-loud quality, it more than made up for it with stark black-and-white cinematography and a gorgeous narrative wrapped around Billy Bob Thornton's exquisite performance.

Then came last year's Intolerable Cruelty, a movie I enjoyed, though mostly for George Clooney's marvelous performance. It seemed telling, though, that it was a film the Coen brothers hadn't started out doing; rather the script had been passed around Hollywood, until finally the Coen brothers spruced it up and made it their own. Then came news they were going to produce a remake of the great Alec Guinness movie The Ladykillers. A remake? Why would the Coen brothers feel the need to do that? The better question, unfortunately, is why would anyone need to see that?

In case you haven't seen the original movie, the plot goes like this. A criminal mastermind named Professor Dorr (played by Tom Hanks) gets together a gang of helpers. They're hoping to rob a casino, and to do that they need to tunnel underneath the water. And to do that, they need to start in an old, black woman's home. Enter Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall), a widow who spends most of her time badgering the sheriff and talking with to the portrait of her dead husband. On the surface, she's no match for Dorr and his cronies. But somebody (though probably not God) is on her side.

One of the most irritating aspects of The Ladykillers is how it uses black gospel music. In O Brother, Where Art Thou?'s lovely score, the various bluegrass and southern gospel numbers mesh beautifully with the story, as if they had been written expressly for the film and not several decades before. The Ladykillers trots out its gospel tunes like so much product placement. They have no bearing on the story whatsoever, and yet we watch the exuberant choir roll through three different full-length songs, as if to say, "Don't you want to run out and buy the soundtrack?" It's not that I have a problem with the music (it's fantastic), but the Coen brothers make no attempt to integrate it into the plot. It just sits there like an advertisement.

This isn't the only example of lazy filmmaking. There are a number of long scenes that merely explain to the audience what's going on. That sort of clumsy exposition isn't suitable for action blockbusters, much less sophisticated comedies. Of course, there isn't much sophisticated about The Ladykillers. Entire sections of plot are given over to jokes about Irritable Bowel Syndrome (complete with gross sound effects), and too many conversations consist simply of grown men swearing at each other.

The Coens have been a fan of humorous dialects since their debut film, Blood Simple. The Ladykillers features three different kinds: the affected English English (as opposed to American English) of Tom Hanks, the old Negro English of Irma P. Hall, and the hip-hop swearing of Marlon Wayans. Irma P. Hall is fantastic, and her portrayal of an upstanding, stubborn, church-going widow is fantastic, especially with her sing-songy vocal inflections. Tom Hanks isn't as good, though part of that is the unfortunate comparison with George Clooney's outings in previous Coen films. Hanks just can't bring off that convoluted vocabulary with the same charm and humor that Clooney can. Worst of all, though, is Marlon Wayans, who showed he could act in Requiem for a Dream. Here, though, he doesn't have much to do besides put his cap on sideways, look stupid, and swear a lot.

My friend Garth suggested that the Coen brothers might've succumbed to a bit of subconscious racial stereotyping, and it's true that the church scenes as well as a painting of Marva's husband do border on the demeaning. But that would ignore the fact that the movie demeans almost everyone and every race. The General (Tzi Ma) is a caricature of the Asian martial artist, and Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons) is a caricature of a southern hick who thinks he knows more than he does. Only Tom Hanks escapes the belittling, though that's because he's Tom Hanks.

The movie does have some laughs, and I was enjoying myself for a while. But it loses its steam about halfway through, and when I woke up the next morning, I could only remember what irritated me about the movie and not what I enjoyed. 

J. Robert Parks