The Whole Ten Yards (2004)
Directed by Howard Deutch
No — The Whole Ten Yards is not woke, scoring 0 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Whole Ten Yards arrives in 2004 as a sequel to a modest hit, and it carries the specific aroma of a franchise reheated without instruction.
Consciousness Markers
The cast is predominantly white with one Black actress in a minor role; no deliberate representation casting or commentary.
No LGBTQ+ themes or characters; a comedic scene of two men waking up in bed is played as a gag, not representation.
The female assassin character is portrayed as incompetent and primarily defined by her sexuality and pregnancy, with no feminist agenda.
No racial themes or commentary; minority characters exist without any exploration of racial identity.
No environmental or climate-related themes.
The plot involves mob money and a bank account, but it is not framed as an anti-capitalist critique.
No body positivity themes or messaging.
Jimmy's compulsive cleaning is played as a quirky character trait, not as neurodivergence representation.
No historical revisionism; the film is a contemporary fictional crime comedy.
No preachy or lecture-like messaging; the film aims for broad comedy.
Why it received this score
The Whole Ten Yards arrives in 2004 as a sequel to a modest hit, and it carries the specific aroma of a franchise reheated without instruction. Howard Deutch directs with the steady hand of a man fulfilling a contract. Bruce Willis cleans. Matthew Perry frets. Amanda Peet, tasked with playing an assassin who cannot land a clean hit, is given a character defined almost entirely by her appetite and, eventually, her pregnancy. The film regards this as comedy. We regard it as data.
The plot concerns a Hungarian mob boss, a kidnapped wife, a torn dollar bill, and a bank account holding two hundred eighty million dollars. Money motivates everyone and critiques no one. There is a scene in which two men wake up in the same bed after a night of drinking, and it functions as a punchline, not a statement. A retired killer's compulsive tidying of his kitchen registers as a quirk of the screenplay, not a window into anything clinical. A Black actress appears in a minor role and the film has nothing to say about her, which is its own kind of silence.
For our purposes, the ledger is blank. No progressive current runs beneath the slapstick. The film wants only to be funny, and by most accounts it fails at that as well. It earned 26.2 million dollars against a 40 million dollar budget, and Matthew Perry later wrote that its reception ended his career as a leading man in features. There is a melancholy in that, but melancholy is not a marker. We file this one under 2004, sequel, and nothing else.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Jimmy "The Tulip" Tudeski now spends his days compulsively cleaning his house and perfecting his culinary skills with his wife, Jill, a purported assassin who has yet to pull off a clean hit. Suddenly, an uninvited and unwelcome connection to their past unexpectedly shows up on Jimmy and Jill's doorstep; it's Oz, and he's begging them to help him rescue his wife, Cynthia.
Questions about The Whole Ten Yards
Is The Whole Ten Yards woke?
No — The Whole Ten Yards is not woke, scoring 0 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Whole Ten Yards have any woke elements?
No. All 10 markers score zero.
How does The Whole Ten Yards compare to other 2004 movies?
It ranks #151 of the 178 films from 2004 we've scored; their average is 12. The wokest is Tropical Malady (62).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.