The Whole Nine Yards

Daily News
[LA Life Weekend]
Friday, February 18, 2000

"Willis, Peet carry film 'The Whole Nine Yards'
By Bob Strauss, film critic

The sympathetic mobster comedy trend reaches a thematic peak/moral nadir with "The Whole Nine Yards," a film in which the best people are the most ruthless killers and those who like and abet them.

The outlandish angle is a step beyond that of last year's "Analyze this," a film this one otherwise wishes to emulate in every way. "Nine Yards" isn't as funny, but after a slow start it develops into it's own kind of farcical good time.

And it's extreme nature actually adds to the laughs - what you're expected to buy into here is often so dark, the only honest response to it is in gasping chuckles.
Of course, all of this presumes that your sense of humor is not connected to your conscience.

Some very good comic performances, especially from the actor you least expect to be that way, add to the film's overall ambience of can-you-believe-it? Hilarity.

Bruce Willis, for example, has been playing action heroes or bland leading men for so long that he's made us forget what great timing and amusing attitude he regularly exhibited on TV's "Moonlighting." It's back here in every insinuating line-reading, only this time with an appropriately sardonic, life-and-death charge instead of mere, leering suggestiveness. Willis hasn't looked like he's had this much fun since "Pulp Fiction" - which says more than it's probably healthy to contemplate about what turns his acting juices on.

Then there's sneaky Amanda Peet, a young actress on the WB's "Jack and Jill" romantic angst series, who starts out in a glibly pretty throwaway part, but is really "Nine Yards" comedy stealth bomb, a time-released booby trap of escalating character contradictions. When she and Willis start sparking - they're each infatuated with the other's professional killing skills - they give the whole "Prizzi's Honor" premise a new and ticklesome, screwball spin.

Willis' Jimmy "The Tulip" Tudeski is a Chicago hit man turned informant who, eschewing the witness protection program, sets up an easily traceable, seemingly suicidal new life in a Montreal suburb.

His neighbor is an unhappy American dentist, Nicholas "Oz" Oseransky ("Friends" Matthew Perry), who's married to a French Canadian shrew (Rosanna Arquette with a wandering accent and abjectly lost comic judgment).

Oz quickly recognizes The Tulip for who he is, but Jimmy insists on becoming pals with the jumpy dentist. Plot contrivances get Oz in up past his neck with a vengeful mob boss (Kevin Pollak), a gigantic underworld enforcer ("The Green Mile's" Michael Clark Duncan) and Jimmy's endangered wife ("Species" Natasha Henstridge). Just about everybody Oz encounters is double-crossing someone else, and they all want somebody or other - oftentimes him - dead.

Laugh riot, huh?

Amazingly, it often is, thanks in great part to director Jonathan Lynn's patient setup of good slow-fused gags (Mitchell Kapner is credited with the script) and a tonal control of the potentially offensive material that's nothing short of astonishing.
And while Perry isn't the funniest person in the film - he essentially adds pratfalls and mortal fear to your basic Chandler Bing - he never fails to provide the antic energy that keeps the convoluted story skipping along.

"The Whole Nine Yards" is easily Lynn's best movie since "My Cousin Vinny," and, like that one, it triumphs on a combination of careful craftsmanship, deft casting and well-sprung surprises.

And as he did with the earlier film's clichéd, fish-out-of-water dynamics, Lynn once again finds a way to breathe freshness into a concept that's quite overused in this age of "Sopranos" worship.

So, enjoy. And see you afterward in line at the confessional.