Rating: 15 Duration: 98 minutes Reviewed: May 19 2000
Matthew Perry is a miserable dentist with a phobia for operations, a toothache of a wife in Rosanna Arquette, and a new neighbour in his peaceful Montreal suburb in Bruce Willis, who has made a career of filling in others, for good.
Hitman Willis is on the run, a stool pigeon in flight from Chicago; Perry is in heavy debt, and his calculating, blackmailing wife forces him to squeal to Bruce's vengeful bosses about where the contract killer now lives, for a finder's fee.
Perry, from Friends, has alas already befriended Bruce, and now he is about to have a whole host of new 'friends': some unwanted, such as mob boss Kevin Pollak; some acquired by necessity, such as mob heavy Michael Clarke Duncan, and one wanted all too intimately, namely Willis's most accommodating wife, Natasha Henstridge.
Add in a missing ten million dollars, ask Amanda Peet's dental assistant to turn hitman groupie and lose her clothes in a Confessions manner, then force Arquette to use an 'Allo 'Allo-approved French accent and Pollak to torture the English language, and British director Jonathan Lynn has a comedy thriller, where the jokes keep treading on the toes of the thrills, and the thrills end up as toothless as Perry's clients. The plot, meanwhile, becomes unnecessarily convoluted in the cause of romping laughs.
Get Shorty had the balance right. By comparison, The Whole Nine Yards puts the hit-and-miss into its hitman tale.
Willis is allowed to wear his trademark white vest - his equivalent of a child's comfort blanket - and he barely keeps his old smirk under control while supposedly playing straight, dry and unflinching to Perry's familiar act of the wimp with the saving grace of a quick wit.
Perry clowns, Willis frowns, Perry does slapsticks, Willis slaps chops, and the flustered-versus-cool double act has its comic moments, particularly in a series of physical set-pieces. The script, however, is as full of corn as a Mexican menu, so neither the laughs nor the thrills sufficiently hurt your insides.
Proficient Saturday night pap, for sure, but unlike its title, this desperate-to-please farce doesn't go the whole nine yards.
Charles Hutchinson
19/05/00
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