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THE WHOLE NINE YARDS Send This Review to a Friend
A comedy about hit men has to be especially funny. "The Whole Nine Yards" is barely funny at all. Mitchell Kapner's lumbering script strains hard to keep the action popping as Nicholas "Oz" Oseransky, a dentist (Matthew Perry), becomes involved with notorious Chicago hit man Jimmy "The Tulip" Tudeski (Bruce Willis), hiding out near Montreal, and various plans to kill become intertwined amid deceptions and doublecrosses. Will Nicholas's greedy, nagging wife Sophie (Rosanna Arquette) manage to get her husband killed? Or will he kill her? Will Jimmy's enemies ice him? Will he get them? And what about Jimmy's estranged wife (Natasha Henstridge)? You get the idea.
For starters Matthew Perry, best known as Chandler Bing on television's "Friends," is more boring than funny as the dentist whose life is suddenly in turmoil. The role of Oz calls for someone with a greater comic touch. The casting is all wrong. Bruce Willis is drolly menacing playing tough guy, but he's done in by a screenplay that sadly lacks enough humor. Arquette is rather gross in the role of Sophie as she puts on an exaggerated French-Canadian accent to go with the locale. Amanda Peet is the most amusing as Jill, Oz's dental assistant, who idolizes Jimmy and longs to become a hit woman.
Try as director Jonathan Lynn does to pump life into the film, it never catches fire in the way a comedy of this sort must to be worth the time spent. A Warner Brothers release.
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