Irma P. Hall entertains a devious Tom Hanks in her living room in 'The Lady Killers.' The Ladykillers Starring Tom Hanks and Irma P. Hall. Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, based on William Rose's screenplay. Rated R.

Are we going to have to start worrying about the Coen brothers? It's beginning to look that way. Their current film, The Ladykillers, is their third straight project that's not up to their usual stuff. It's also been a while since they've had an original story. They took the unprecedented step of directing someone else's script in last year's Intolerable Cruelty, and this is the first time they've remade something. Specifically, they've latched onto a deliciously dark 1955 English comedy of the same name, directed by the criminally underappreciated Alexander Mackendrick.

Remaking a masterpiece is generally a high-risk, low-reward enterprise, but on paper the original film should be right up the Coens' alley. Mackendrick's The Ladykillers, like the Coens' Fargo, is a nasty piece of work with an unlikely sweetness at its center. It's about five criminals who rent a room in a house belonging to an elderly widow. They use the house as a base from which to pull off a big-time robbery, and it goes smoothly until the old lady discovers what they're up to. The crooks realize that they need to kill her in order to silence her, but she's so innocent and grandmotherly that they can't bring themselves to do it, and they wind up betraying and murdering one another instead. The Coens specialize in criminal conspiracies gone awry, and they built Fargo around a figure of similar warmth and humanity. They also move the story to Mississippi, the genteel Southern lifestyle acting as a reasonable facsimile of the English variety.

The old lady is named Mrs. Munson in the new version, and she's played by Irma P. Hall. The Coens have African-Americanized the character, and to be honest, they've turned her into a Big Momma stereotype. I don't think their intentions were racist; they tend to stereotype white characters, too. Even so, the filmmakers never bring themselves to take Mrs. Munson's small-town Baptist world-view seriously. The Coens aren't the most sensitive guys when it comes to racial matters or anything else, and their rendering of this character feels uncomfortably close to caricature. The right actress could have corrected them, but Hall doesn't have the right soft touch to make Mrs. Munson properly sympathetic. The same character in the original film was a frail, tiny woman, flawlessly played by one Katie Johnson, who never realizes how much genuine danger she's in but is terribly funny because she sabotages the crooks' well-laid plans just by being her irrepressibly dotty self. It's hard not to find Mrs. Munson wanting in comparison.

As the leader of the criminals, Tom Hanks goes over the top. When you're starring in a Coen brothers' movie and playing a character named Goldthwait Higginson Dorr III, Ph.D., you don't have too many other options. Though he makes a valiant stab at his character's fussy orotundity and shabby Southern fake gentility, the sort of heavily stylized acting that's required here doesn't come naturally to him. (See him in The Bonfire of the Vanities for further proof.) Leering, grinning maniacally, and emitting hiccupping bursts of laughter at odd times, he comes off as a gargoyle, but where he really trips up is on his dialogue. His speeches are fuzzy; he mumbles his lines and runs his sentences together, and he gets so wrapped up in the verbiage that he loses track of where the laughs are, an astonishing lapse for such a skilled comic actor. George Clooney could have knocked this off easily, John Goodman would have been spot-on, and Eddie Murphy would have been a fascinating left-field choice. The Coens have been geniuses at casting their previous films, but Hanks' misconceived work here shows just how difficult it is to handle their loquacious writing.

For all the misfires here, the Coens haven't lost their touch entirely. The film has somewhere between five and 10 really good laughs. At the movie's beginning we see a poster saying, "Re-elect Sheriff Wyner: He Is Too Old to Go to Work." The successive deaths of the bad guys and the disposal of their bodies are all staged humorously, though none of them are as hilarious as the hit man's accidental self-inflicted death at the end of Intolerable Cruelty. The Coens' fellow-traveling music producer T Bone Burnett assembles a soundtrack full of rich, smooth old-time gospel tunes, which help the film go down easily.

Still, the Coens' dawdling approach keeps their movie from building momentum, while Mackendrick's original film is a model of ruthless economy and precision. The farce is curiously defanged as a result. With its broad humor and small-town milieu, The Ladykillers bears a disturbing resemblance to last year's The Fighting Temptations. From filmmakers as transcendently talented as the Coens, we've come to expect more than that.

You can reach Kristian Lin at kristian.lin@fwweekly.com.

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