I've admired some of the Coen's other movies, and Tom Hanks gives a smooth comic performance here.

That's about it.

It's not a very funny movie. It's not entirely lacking in the Coen's sort of irony and wit -- two of the gangsters constantly at each others' throats are a jive-talking rastafarian-looking black kid and an older white guy who was a freedom rider. But the humor is driven in with a sledgehammer, what there is of it. While demonstrating how safe it is to handle a kind of explosive, the expert hits it with a hammer and blows his finger off. There follows an argument about whether or not it can be sewn back on like Bobbitt's penis. The black kid claims it can be although it might "maybe look like a chewed up frankfurter." In the original the crooks execute a simple but nicely choreographed heist on a city street and involve their old landlady in the retrieval of the money. Here, the crooks tunnel into the vault. Why? Digging tunnels and having accidents (the fuse that stops, then restarts at the wrong moment) are easier to do than figuring out jokes that might take place during a street robbery. And the old landlady is in no way involved in the plan. She stumbles on the gang by accident while the air is filled with fluttering bills. She's also not old and delicate. She's in late middle age, energetic, and robust.

Well. Others might enjoy it more than I did, especially if they're not familiar with the unsurpassable original. I personally am getting awfully tired of remakes. What a dearth of creativity they portend. They are beginning to make parodies of parodies. Shot-for-shot remakes of classics that were in no need of remaking. What next? "Citizen Kane" starring Keanu Reeves in Splendocolor? "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Part Two: The Return of Gold Hat"? "Viagra Comes to Golden Pond"? Another remake of "Reefer Madness"? You see where I'm going with this. The MBAs have taken over the asylum.

It's the deep south. Eccentric professor G.H. Dorr (Tom Hanks) leads a wacky group of thieves to rob a riverboat casino. He rents a room from old lady Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall). The gang pretends to be church musicians and starts digging a tunnel from her root cellar. The group includes casino cleaning crew Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans),movie prop guy Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons),donut shop owner The General (Tzi Ma) who dug tunnels in Vietnam, and bad football player Lump Hudson (Ryan Hurst). Pancake brings in his girlfriend Mountain Girl (Diane Delano). George Wallace plays Sheriff Wyner.

I found the weird characters more distracting than funny. There is some slapstick comedy. It tries to be a black comedy but it stumbles into wacky territories. The story is slow like molasses and the drama has no tension. It's a lot of Coen style and mannerisms. I feel it's overwhelmed by it. There is a lot of wide ranging music and again I feel overwhelmed by it. The group is so random that they don't start off with any chemistry at all. That's what I miss the most about this movie. I get no sense of their relationship because the characters don't really have any. Also Tom Hank's southern accent doesn't appeal to me. The old black lady put me off. I couldn't find anybody to root for. The whole movie feels stuck in deliberate whimsy mode without the humanity. A lot of this just drove me nuts although I appreciate the Coen brothers are always trying to do their own thing.

The 1955 "Ladykillers" is a great sarcastic black humor British comedy, with five elegant small-time thieves and an irritating old lady. This version of the Coen brothers brought the same story to the Mississipi, changed the armored car by a casino and lost all the glamour of the original movie. I do not know how American viewers feel regarding the accent of Mississipi and the behavior of the locals, but for me it is very boring. Tom Hanks is excellent, as usual, but for those who have appreciate the original movie, I believe it is impossible to like this remake. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Matadores de Velhinha" ("Old Lady Killers")