13 Times You Lost Respect For Your Favourite Filmmakers

6. The Coen Brothers - The Ladykillers

Unquestionably one of The Coen Brother's worst films, the Tom Hanks headlined remake of The Ladykillers is an exercise in frivolity and off-putting, gross-out humor. As opposed to the brothers' later film True Grit - which is arguably better than the John Wayne original - The Ladykillers in no way, shape or form trumps the 1955 film starring Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness. Most of what stinks about The Ladykillers is the feeling of desperation that the story gives off. Throughout the film one senses, quite clearly, that the filmmakers were desperate to find laughs, somewhere.. anywhere. While some comedic elements work - such as Hanks' humorous performance as the esoteric dandy, Professor G.H. Dorr - most of them don't. For proof one should consider two of the characters who constitute Dorr's criminal gang: Lump Hudson and Garth Pancake, who are played by Ryan Hurst and J.K. Simmons respectively, both of whom are absolutely wasted, saddled with material that is not only beneath them in regards to talent, but also in terms of age bracket. For instance Garth's main, zany shtick is that he has irritable bowel syndrome; that's his whole deal. Digestion humor may be something typically mined by Will Ferrell, Jay Roach, and the Farrelly Brothers, but it feels profoundly incongruent in the world of The Coens. Historically, they have been able to keep their sense of humor largely out of the toilet bowl, and have produced several great comedies as a result. The Ladykillers however is definitely not one of them.