THE WHOLE NINE YARDS

Susan Granger’s review of “THE WHOLE NINE YARDS” (Warner Bros.)

Bruce Willis teams up with Friends Matthew Perry in this formulaic mobster comedy. Willis plays a cool professional hitman who moves incognito into an upscale Montreal suburb, while Perry is his nerdy neighbor, a dentist, who immediately recognizes him as Jimmy “The Tulip” Tudeski, who squealed on his former employers, the Gogolak crime family of Chicago. “It’s not important that I’ve killed 17 people,” Willis tells the incredulous Perry. “What’s important is how I get along with the people that are still alive.” Soon, the disparate men find they share a common bond: someone’s trying to kill them both. Perry’s shrewish wife, vamped with an outrageous French accent by Rosanna Arquette, complains that her husband is “the only dentist who can’t make money!” She not only wants to kill him so she can collect on his life insurance but she also wants to nab the reward for nailing The Tulip. Enormous Michael Clarke Duncan (The Green Mile) ostensibly works as an enforcer for Janni Gogolak (Kevin Pollak), while Amanda Peet is sweetly sympathetic and remarkably helpful as Perry’s dental assistant who has a secret yearning to be a contract killer. Plus there’s Natasha Henstridge, as Willis’ cold, calculating ex-wife, who inexplicably finds the bumbling Perry sexually irresistible. Writer Mitchell Kapner repeatedly capitalizes on a running joke about the Canadian habit of putting mayo on a hamburger, and director Jonathan Lynn does his best to keep the zany, bizarre action moving quickly. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, The Whole Nine Yards is a ludicrous, lame, farcical 4. Problem is: these are amiable but crude, essentially superficial caricatures, not three-dimensional characters, like Billy Crystal and Robert DeNiro in the mob comedy Analyze This.

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