(out of four)
By David N. Butterworth
Somewhere within the scattershot confines of Barry Levinson’s Bandits
lies a halfway decent movie struggling to get out.
There’s probably not a whole lot wrong with the film that a decent editor
couldn’t fix (cutter Stu Linder appears not to be it). It’s got a
cute premise, likable stars, and the potential for many laughs along the way.
But director Levinson seems to have asked Mr. Linder to make sure that every
frame of available footage–funny or not, relevant or not, good, bad, and
indifferent (or not)–wound up in the finished film. And to heck with
continuity: just throw it together in any old order!
Bandits, then, is a caper comedy starring Bruce Willis, Billy Bob
Thornton, and Cate Blanchett that flashes back early and often. Joseph Blake and
Terry Lee Collins are “America’s Most Wanted,” lovable Robin Hood-style
bank robbers known as “The Sleepover Bandits” by virtue of the fact that
they hold a bank manager hostage the night before a heist. What I could never
figure out is why they hang around for the tellers to show up the next morning
but I’m sure that’s one of the many plot details I missed during this
unnecessarily frenetic and surprisingly clumsy movie.
There are scenes in Bandits that’ll leave you scratching your head
in bewilderment. Like when Blanchett, as a frustrated housewife who winds up on
the lam with Joe and Terry and cannot chose between them, starts spontaneously
lip-synching to a Bonnie Tyler hit while preparing a gourmet dinner for her
unappreciative husband early in the film–where did that come from you
ask? And then the puzzlingly brief montage of her and Willis’s character
cavorting on the beach with those Polaroid snapshots thrown in to accentuate the
positive–what was that all about you wonder? And the soundtrack!
One cringe-worthy pop song after another.
It’s as if Levinson deliberately wanted to cram as many clichés into the
film’s overly long two hours as he (or his screenwriter Harley Peyton) could,
not to mention every available style of filmmaking. Even the film’s tag line,
“Two’s Company. Three’s a Crime,” reeks of the overused.
Willis and Thornton have a pretty nice chemistry, though. Joe (Willis), the
charmer, has long hair; Terry (played by the ever-changing Thornton), the
brains, has short hair. They might be likened to Bonnie and Clyde on the
syndicated TV show that follows (and exploits) their exploits, but with their
seemingly bottomless grab bag of bad wigs and outrageous disguises, Joe and
Terry more often resemble Sonny and Cher. By contrast, Blanchett's performance
is closer to overwrought than impassioned.
I take back what I said about the editing of this film (although when
separating the wheat from the chaff one typically tends to keep the wheat!).
There’s probably not a whole lot wrong with Bandits that a decent director
couldn’t fix. Levinson used to be a decent director (Diner, Tin Men,
Rain Man, Bugsy), but recently he’s been all over the map,
quality-wise, with as many uncomfortable shifts in genre in the last ten years (Jimmy
Hollywood, Sleepers, Sphere, An Everlasting Piece) as
Leelee Sobieksi has had openings in the last ten days.
There’s a germ of a fine film in Bandits, some decent ideas and a
few genuine laughs, but nobody took the time to develop these comic situations
into anything beyond obligatory. Don’t go expecting another Get Shorty
that’s for sure. In contrast to that film’s smart, sharp dialogue and
dynamite performances, Bandits feels labored and haphazard, a big in-joke
where the joke, unfortunately, is on us.
