The Whole Nine Yards (2000)

The Whole Nine Yards opens with a dentist and ends with a boat, and in between it arranges mobsters, marital grievances and a witness protection arrangement with the tidy efficiency of a man sorting cutlery. Jonathan Lynn directs Mitchell Kapner's script as though the sitcom were a legitimate dramatic form, which in 2000 it very nearly was. Matthew Perry does his Matthew Perry things. Bruce Willis stands nearby with a gun and an expression of mild contractual obligation. The film wants nothing more than to be liked, and it largely succeeds at being harmless.

There are women here who do things. Amanda Peet's Jill turns out to be a contract killer of genuine competence, and Natasha Henstridge's Cynthia spends the final act negotiating her own survival with a clear head. The film does not congratulate itself for any of this, which is its saving grace. Michael Clarke Duncan appears as Franklin, imposing and unremarked upon, since the screenplay has no interest in making a point of him. Nobody in Montreal lectures anybody about anything. That is not a criticism. It is simply the era.

Which leaves us with a film that has no thesis, no sermon and no ambition beyond a reasonably brisk ninety-eight minutes. It contains no environmental parable, no economic theory, no reckoning with the historical record, and no interest in the interior lives of anyone who is not holding a gun or a grudge. For a certain kind of viewer this comes as a relief. For the classifier it is an unremarkable specimen, a crime comedy that wants to make us laugh and forgets to say anything else. The whole nine yards, it turns out, is just a number.

THEMATIC TAGS: box_office_number_one (opened at #1 domestically with $13.7 million). The film is the original, not a sequel, though it later spawned one, and it is not adapted from any published source, based on real events, or concerned with superheroes, nor did it win Academy Awards.

{"thematic_tags": ["box_office_number_one"]}