Bandits
**
Cinema
Releases - November 30, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 12. 122
minutes. Directed by Barry Levinson. Written by Harley Peyton. Starring Bruce
Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Cate Blanchett, Troy Garity.
"Bandits" opens with Bruce Willis
and Billy Bob Thornton surrounded by cops, cuts to a TV news report that
tells us they're dead, then cuts to an interview they did some weeks before,
then starts telling their story in flashback. The screenplay darts around
so much that the movie has no chance of getting a rhythm going. In comedy,
that's death.
Willis and Thornton play a pair of old friends
who escape from prison and devise a scheme to become 'The Sleepover Bandits'.
Each time they rob a bank they will investigate the bank manager and stay
at his house the night before the robbery. Instead of having to stick up
the cash register, the plan is to calmly and amiably hold the bank manager
hostage, and gain access to the vault when he goes to work in the
morning.
The movie follows Willis and Thornton over the
course of several weeks, as they go from state to state, picking up loot
and dreaming of the hotel they're gonna open in Mexico. Along the way an
unhappy young housewife played by Cate Blanchett joins them as a willing
hostage after bumbling into their company. Willis and Thornton both fall
for her, and she falls for both of them, and in between the love triangle
business she drives the getaway car.
There is a glimmer of promise throughout "Bandits"
-- there are a couple of clever plot points that brought a smile to my face,
and Thornton gives a wonderful, idiosyncratic performance as a man who could
easily give up the life of crime but can't shake his hypochondria. I wanted
to like the movie, but couldn't. Blanchett is so beautiful that she's endlessly
watchable, but her character is distracting, and keeps making uneasy,
unconvincing transitions from neurotic klutz to wise and sensual lady. Willis
doesn't work at all; he has an okay rapport with Thornton, but his manner
is smug and detached, as if he's trying to drift his way through the film
with meditation exercises. Back in the days of "Moonlighting" he had stunning
comic energy, but now it's long gone.
What's most frustrating is that damned structure.
The movie gives away things at the top that we don't need to know until the
end, and hops around throughout, as if this is some kind of mystery story.
"Bandits" is a lightweight comedy that might have worked with a linear structure,
but feels too bland as it is.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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