WhatzUp

Bandits
by Derek Neff

After one of the least believable jailbreaks in the history of cinema, convicts Joe (Bruce Willis) and Terry (Billy Bob Thornton) set out on a nationwide bank robbing spree in which they fall into the habit of kidnapping the manager of their targeted bank the night before. The so-called “Sleepover Bandits” encounter a bump in the road in the form of Kate (Cate Blanchett), an unhappily married woman who at first is their captive, then their partner-in-crime. Both Joe and Terry fall in love with Kate, and Kate, much to her discredit — these guys are both capital-L losers — falls in love with both men in turn.

Bandits is director Barry Levinson’s first road movie since Rain Man 15 years ago, but one would be hard pressed to find any other similarities between the two pictures. Where Rain Man succeeded at being a personal, human and altogether great film, Bandits succeeds a giving us little more than a few mild laughs in the context of a timeworn story about characters we never really believe in, let alone care about.

Nominally a comedy, Bandits puts so much energy into trying to be funny that it resembles the pilot episode of a doomed-to-fail TV sitcom. Everyone is so desperate to make you laugh you feel almost guilty that you don’t find it all that amusing. Bruce Willis plays a lovably gruff tough-guy, Billy Bob Thornton plays a nasal-voiced hypochondriac, Cate Blanchett plays a wannabe femme fatale, and all three performances feel joyless and forced. The screenplay by Harley Peyton, while occasionally funny, seems molded out of some film-school formula for Quirky Comedy, complete with a crappy alterna-pop soundtrack and numerous product placement ads.