Arts & Entertainment
 

This 'Ten Yards' is enough

By Ray Hafner
The Daily Cougar

While it's an old showbiz adage to "Give 'em what they want," sometimes movies can get away with giving audiences stuff they didn't particularly want, or didn't even know they were missing. That's certainly the case with Bruce Willis' The Whole Ten Yards, a screwball comedy follow-up to 2000's The Whole Nine Yards.

It's hard to imagine anyone clamoring for this sequel, but it's probably thanks to that lack of enthusiasm that writer Mitchell Kapner and director Howard Duetsch took actual effort to turn out a solid comedy. 

Done in the screwball tradition of 1930s comedy, The Whole Ten Yards fills itself out with a quirky plot and wacky characters. While it's not a requisite to have seen the original, it does help. But newcomers to the series shouldn't have much trouble following the story.

The film opens with Matthew Perry's Oz Oseransky fleeing to Mexico to beg Bruce Willis' Jimmy "The Tulip" Tudeski to help him get back his kidnapped wife. Both Perry and Willis fling themselves head first into their characters, sometimes quite literally in Perry's case. 

The characters are all crazy here, and that helps coax out hilarious performances from Amanda Peet, Natasha Henstridge and especially Kevin Pollak, who spends the whole movie hidden behind makeup and a ridiculous accent as Laszlo Gogolak, a gangster trying to kill Tudeski.

The Whole Ten Yards seems to work in spite of itself. The structure of the whole film just isn't normal and the story is lame even by screwball standards. But like those screwball classics of yesteryear -- think Bringing Up Baby -- this one warms the heart with intimate moments, like when Tudeski, the hired killer, opens up to Oz while drunk.

Peet, who spends part of the movie trying to get her first kill, is adorable in her role. Perry seems to have drawn short shrift, since the script calls for him to mostly run around and try and figure out what's going on. 

The ending is a mess, with a deus ex machina of a few hundred million bucks spread around the good guys, but the ride there is worth the price. 

The Whole Ten Yards

Rated: PG-13

Starring: Bruce Willis, Matthew Perry

Warner Bros.

The verdict: One extra yard is enough. No need for an 11th.
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