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'The Whole Nine Yards' is cliché-laden comedy  Van Roberts "The Whole Nine Yards" isn't as good as "Analyze This," but it surpasses "Mickey Blue Eyes." This heavy-handed hokum about an ultra-cool hit man who needs to whack his estranged wife and the vengeful son of an Hungarian crime boss to collect $10 million stashed in a bank vault lacks the comedy of "Analyze This." Now, let's not forget the accident-prone dentist who collides with everything in sight as he struggles to help our anti-heroic hit man to his ill-gotten gains. "Yards" recycles so many crime movie cliches that you'll know what the characters plan to do before they do it. Montreal dentist Nicholas "Oz" Oseransky (Matthew Perry) lives a miserable life. Not only is he hitched to Sophie (Rosanna Arquette), who preys constantly on him for cash, but also he has been stuck with paying off his late father-in-law's gigantic debt. Sophie holds Oz in such contempt that she denies him her body. Just when things couldn't get any worse, Oz discovers that the new neighbor next door is none other than the notorious Jimmy "The Tulip" Tudeski (Bruce Willis). A veteran contract killer for the Gogolak gang, Tudeski served five years before he ratted out his boss and won his freedom. "The Tulip" is so ballsy that he passed on the witness protection program and decided to settle in Montreal. When Sophie hears about him, she packs Oz off to Chicago to alert the Gogolaks and request a "finder's fee" of $5,000. If Oz can manage this small feat, she promises to divorce him. Reluctantly, the hen-pecked Oz wings it off to the Windy City, while his treacherous wife visits Jimmy and warns him about Oz. No sooner has Oz checked into his motel than he runs afoul of a grinning Gogolak gorilla, Frankie Figs (Michael Clarke Duncan of "The Green Mile"), who towers over him like Goliath. Later, Oz finds himself at the Gogolak family mansion where Janni (Kevin Pollak), the son of an imprisoned crime boss, dreams about killing ŒYimmy." Janni wrestles with his English accent, and his malapropisms allow him some clever comic moments. Pollak pronounces all of his V's as if they were W's and vice versa; for example, "I vill kill the wervin." While Oz tip-toes around Janni in the mobster's mansion, he runs into Jimmy's estranged wife, Cynthia (foxy Natasha Henstridge of "Species"), who cuddles up with him later at his motel. Cynthia and Oz, neither of whom have had been laid for five years, shack up. Cynthia explains that she is still Jimmy's wife. Although he cheats regularly on her, Jimmy is insanely jealous. None of this means anything to Oz, who has fallen hopelessly in love with Cynthia and vows to protect her. Matters get complicated when Cynthia explains that Jimmy wants Janni and her dead so that he get his hands on $10 million. "The Whole Nine Yards" sounds like a sure-fire comedy of errors, but everything boils down to a comedy of cliches with nothing new to enliven the antics. Bruce Willis is appropriately poker-faced as Jimmy, but he takes his tight-lipped, tough-guy act beyond the subtlety required for a comedy. Meanwhile, poor Matthew Perry plays the disaster-prone hero who concocts a "Charlie Varrick" scheme to hide the evidence. Perry humiliates himself when he tries to imitate the likes of Jack Lemmon or Tom Hanks. There is nothing funny about the way Perry collides with stationary obstacles. Ultimately, "The Whole Nine Yards" qualifies as a mediocre potboiler. |
