I'm glad somebody had fun during this movie.

In The Ladykillers, Professor G.H. Dorr, played to silky perfection by Tom Hanks, tells his prospective landlady, "You, madam, are addressing a man, who is in fact quiet... and yet, not quiet." Allow me to offer you a similar riddle in regards to the film itself: it's a movie that is in fact Coen . . . and yet, not Coen.

By this, of course, I mean that it was written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, and yet, somehow, it feels un-Coen-like. Sure, there are the familiar elements: curiously verbal characters, odd twists of fate, a ludicrous crime gone horribly awry. But while the brothers have combined those things to hilarious effect in such movies as Raising Arizona and Intolerable Cruelty, here the formula fails them, or perhaps they fail the formula.

The movie loosely remakes a British comedy from the 1950s, transplanting the action to the American South. Professor Dorr assembles a gang with varying areas of expertise to rob a riverboat casino. The plan hinges on digging a tunnel to the casino's underground vault from the basement of one Marva Munson, the lady of the title. So Dorr rents a room from Mrs. Munson and begs the use of her root cellar, telling her he's the leader of a quintet practicing religious music. One thing leads to another and eventually the boys decide they need to kill Mrs. Munson, though that turns out to be not as easy as they'd imagined.

Their forbidden love could no longer be denied.

The same could be said for remaking an Ealing Studios comedy, I suppose, because the Coen Brothers manage to make as much of a mess of things as their characters do. Their dialogue, usually so giddily musical, here feels sluggish and . . . okay, I know this isn't a word usually used to describe dialogue, but somehow it seems to fit . . . lumpy. Yeah, lumpy, like they stuck together globs of dialogue they'd written for other movies without much regard for whether they worked here. The Coen brothers' characters are usually caricatures, but so sharply written that you eventually come to know them as human beings. Here they're still caricatures, but without the sharp parts.

This is partly due to the writing, partly to the acting. Mrs. Munson (Irma P. Hall) is straight from the feisty Southern black lady playbook, and the rest of the characters, including a painfully stupid muscleman named Lump (Ryan Hurst) and the borderline racially offensive lazy-criminal-trash-talking Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans) don't fare much better. J.K. Simmons displays zero comic timing as Garth Pancake, the team's explosives expert. Maybe this part could have been funny played by frequent Coen cast member John Goodman, though considering Pancake's primary character trait is irritable bowel syndrome, no, probably not.

Next year's cast of Trading Spaces.

There is one thing I liked about The Ladykillers, and I liked it quite a bit. Tom Hanks, in his most broadly comic role since Saving Private Ryan, is all oily charm and faux gentility, and absolutely hilarious. I hope he and the Coens give each other another chance when there's a better script in the mix.

And, you know, to be fair, the movie's final act, with each of the gang members in turn trying to off Mrs. Munson, has a Wile E. Coyote type doomed quality that kind of works. But that's it: Hanks and the last twenty minutes or so of the movie. The rest of the film, if I may extend the Wile E. Coyote metaphor, feels like a Coen brothers movie that's been squashed under an anvil. Here's hoping they can pick themselves up and shake themselves out before the next one comes along.

Gorilla Pants rating: .5 out of 4 bananas