The Whole Nine Yards *** (2000, Matthew Perry, Bruce Willis, Rosanna Arquette) – Classic Movie Review 1,569

Matthew Perry is rewarded with the best possible star supporting player in Bruce Willis, in the often very funny 2000 crime comedy film The Whole Nine Yards, a weird screwball farce with a high body count.

Friends’ Matthew Perry has another stab at film stardom in 2000, and is rewarded with the best possible star supporting player in Bruce Willis, in director Jonathan Lynn’s ragged and untidy but often very funny crime comedy film The Whole Nine Yards, a weird screwball farce with a high body count.

Both star players rejoice in their typecast roles, with Perry as ‘Oz’ Oseransky, a weak-kneed Montréal dentist with the French wife from hell,  Sophie (Rosanna Arquette), and Willis as his new suburban neighbour, America’s most wanted hitman, Jimmy ‘The Tulip’ Tudeski. Oz’s wife convinces him to go to Chicago to earn a reward by informing Mob boss Yanni (Kevin Pollak) where to find and kill Jimmy.

Naturally, Perry and Willis become the best of Friends, and soon Perry’s hiring Willis to bump off Arquette, while she has the same plan with Perry in mind. Like the plan, the film doesn’t work out smoothly, but the best of it is pitched somewhere between funny and hilarious. Mitchell Kapner’s screenplay is a pretty good one.

Willis is amusing doing virtually nothing, playing the comedy quite seriously. Perry has to go into slapstick overdrive to get his laughs. But both of them are a hoot. And Arquette is effective too in her very unsympathetic and ungrateful nasty wife role.

Michael Clarke Duncan, Natasha Henstridge, Amanda Peet and Harland Williams also star.

It was a hit. Perry and Willis were back for the sequel, The Whole Ten Yards, in 2004.

The children running between Jimmy and Oz next to the flower cart are Willis’s three daughters, Tallulah Belle, Scout LaRue and Rumer. Oz mistakenly hands the menu to the waitress twice at the outdoor café with Jill (Peet).

Matthew Perry (August 19, 1969 – October 28, 2023) made his big screen debut in the 1988 film A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon. On October 28, 2023, Los Angeles police found him dead in a hot tub at his Los Angeles home aged 54, apparently drowned, with no sign of drugs or foul play.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1,569

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