The Whole Nine Yards

Ealasaid/ March 3, 2000/ Movie Reviews and Features

Originally written for The Occidental.

“The Whole Nine Yards” is an excellent film on a number of levels. The acting is terrific, the settings perfectly picked, and the overall effect is a wonderfully funny mob movie.

“Oz” Oseransky (Matthew Perry) is not a happy man. His wife, Sophie (Rosanna Arquette), hates his guts and he hates hers, but she won’t give him a divorce. Just when things are almost intolerable, he discovers that the nice guy who just moved in next door to him is Jimmy “The Tulip” Tudeski (Bruce Willis), a notorious hitman who just got out of jail.

To make matters worse, Jimmy has a price on his head – to get a lighter sentence, he ratted out the boss of a big Hungarian gang in Detroit. Now Janni (Kevin Pollak), the bosses’ son, is gunning for Jimmy. When Sophie finds out, she insists that Oz go to Janni’s gang and tell them where Jimmy is, and try to get a finders’ fee. Not surprisingly, that’s only the start of Oz’s problems.

Bruce Willis just gets better with every film he does. “The Sixth Sense” proved that he could do drama, and “The Whole Nine Yards” shows off his ability to be hysterically funny without overacting. Except for one scene, Jimmy is completely unflappable, and Willis’ quiet acting just emphasizes the humor around him.

Matthew Perry does a great job with Oz, a normal guy propelled into seriously abnormal circumstances. Perry is able to handle the physical comedy of his role without being idiotic – partly because the slapstick moments are scattered sparsely through the film rather than laid on with a trowel, and partly because he looks as though the motions he goes through are completely logical to his character rather than planned jokes.

The rest of the cast is just as good. Arquette is delightful as the not-beautiful-but-still-a-sexpot wife Oz is stuck with. Amanda Peet, as Oz’s secretary, and Michael Clarke Duncan, as one of Janni’s enforcers, bring a wonderful enthusiasm to the film. Kevin Pollak is also good, although his on-again off-again accent is one of the film’s few weak spots.

The two locations for the movie’s main action, Canadian suburbia and Detroit, are perfectly chosen. “Canadian” suburbs look almost exactly like American suburbs, but with somewhat bigger lawns and nicer houses. The innocent exterior makes a delightful background for the scheming and plotting that goes on inside the houses. Although the idea has been used before, it doesn’t seem tired. Detroit plays a fairly small part in the film, but what we see of it fits Oz’s terrified mood perfectly. The skyscrapers hem him in as effectively as the narrow walls of the hotel he stays in.

The film as a whole is a delight. Oz is very high-strung, and watching him interact with the other characters, who so calmly handle the things that completely freak him out, is wonderful. The characters and their interactions ring consistently true, which makes the film even funnier.

So, the bottom line is: if you’re looking for a good laugh with some action and scheming thrown in, “The Whole Nine Yards” is the movie for you. But if you’re looking for profound intellectual discussion or science fiction horror, fugeddaboudit.

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