The Whole Nine Yards

Directed by Jonathan Lynn, The Whole Nine Yards follows Matthew Perry’s Oz Oseransky as he discovers that his new next-door neighbor (Bruce Willis’s Jimmy Tudeski) is an infamous mob assassin with a hefty bounty on his head – with complications and murder ensuing after Oz, on the advice of his gold-digging wife (Rosanna Arquette’s Sophie), decides to turn Jimmy in to Kevin Pollak’s volatile gangster. It’s an appealing premise that’s employed to watchable yet mostly underwhelming effect by Lynn, as the filmmaker, working from a script by Mitchell Kapner, delivers a laugh-free comedy that remains pitched at a level of sitcom-like mediocrity virtually from start to finish – with the uniformly affable performances ultimately ensuring that the picture is, at the very least, tolerable. (Perry and Willis are quite good here, although it’s Amanda Peet, cast as an exuberant dental assistant/fledgling assassin, who walks away with the title of M.V.P.) The progressively frenetic bent of Kapner’s screenplay paves the way for a somewhat exhausting final third that’s hardly as madcap or uproarious as Lynn has undoubtedly intended, which ensures that the whole thing peters out to a rather distressing degree – thus cementing its place as a mostly forgettable comedy that could (and should) be so much better.

** out of ****