Tom Hanks shanks with 'The Ladykillers'

Perhaps better than any other filmmakers, the Coen Brothers are adept at creating unique comedic worlds which operate with their own brilliant yet skewered logic. Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? are all films with bizarre characters and situations -- which are believable within the worlds the Coens create. Even their more serious ventures like Blood Simple, Fargo and The Man Who Wasn't There are films which derive humor out of their peculiar but self-contained worlds. Unfortunately, the crazy characters of The Ladykillers -- a remake of the 1955 comedy -- are set in a more realistic movie. Rather than seeing their eccentricities as part of a hilariously odd world, they make these characters seem out of place.\nTake Tom Hanks' lead character, Professor Goldthwait Higginson Dorr. The previews show Dorr with an odd laugh, which seemed humorous, but within the context of the movie it's not nearly as funny as it is distracting. Hanks does a terrific job in the role, on par with Nicolas Cage in Arizona and John Turturro in Fink. But those movies embraced their characters, while this one wants to stand outside of them; the film detracts from the quality of Hanks' work, and I got more laughs from him in Catch Me If You Can than in this.\nThe story revolves around Dorr, a con man who moves into an old woman's house in order to tunnel from her cellar to a riverboat casino vault. He presents himself and his four partners in crime as a classical music group of the Lord who need a quiet place to practice, and the five men play a loud CD of classical music while tunneling. Like Hanks, the four actors playing the group are eccentric cartoon characters each defined by very specific character traits. They are funny but not real. In a movie about a robbery which depends on lying to an old woman and then possibly killing her, we never get a sense of what kind of people these are morally, particularly Dorr, because the last twenty minutes prohibit that.\nThis is not to say that The Ladykillers is a bad movie. I was rarely bored and the laughs were consistent, though they were never the kinds of gut-busting laughs which dominate Arizona and Lebowski. While the movie's conclusion seems like a cop-out, it was funny and fair. The movie has enough laughs to sustain its 104 minutes, and is certainly better than most comedies which come out these days. But it is not a great movie, and certainly not indicative of the kind of work the Coen Brothers usually put out. If you're looking for a comedy, it's fine. If you're looking for a good comedy, it'll do. But if you're looking for a good Coen Brother comedy, rent something listed above.