Bandits

Rating:
Summary: Great Fun with Willis, Thornton, & Blanchett
Review: This is a comedy-caper film that might easily have been titled THE ODD COUPLE ROB BANKS. It is well acted and cleverly scripted, with dozens of situations and conversations that are very funny. Of course, disaster threatens at the end, but, because we know this is a comedy, we expect that it will be avoided in some way, hopefully in a surprising but fairly plausible manner. Although viewers who pay attention will be able to guess the actual happy ending correctly, this ability will not detract from their enjoyment any more than it did if they correctly foresaw the ending to the film DAVE. For contrast, this film is far more enjoyable than HEIST, an unsavory happy-ending caper movie starring Hackman and DiVito.

Rating:
Summary: Strange Bandits
Review: Anything Barry Levinson touches turns into gold, you might say he's got the Midas touch... With the cast that includes Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis, this was almost destined to be a great film. Neither Thornton, nor Willis are known for their comedy, but this movie is funny. Although it is usually billed as comedy/drama, it actually overlaps several genre: comedy, action, adventure, drama, and suspense.

Thornton and Willis are escaped convicts who go on a spree, robbing banks left and right by taking the bank manager hostage the night before robbery and then using his key to access the vault the next morning, before anyone else has a chance to get to the bank. Their road-trip is facilitated by a series of car jackings, during one of which Thornton's character, Terry, picks up a bored, unappreciated housewife, Kate, who becomes a partner in crime.

A romance soon develops. First, between Joe (played by Willis) and Kate and later between Terry and Kate. This strange love triangle is made even stranger by the sporadic presence of a stunt man who helps Joe and Terry with their robberies.

Billy Bob is in one of his best roles here, portraying an intelligent, witty, hypochondriacal and neurotic criminal who is the "brains" behind the bandits' robberies. Willis also turns in a good performance, and so does the supporting cast.

This is not a laugh out loud movie, but it is witty and entertaining, and I did root for the bandits, especially in the very end as their lives were in the balance and seemed about to end. Although the experience portrayed in the movie is a bit farcical, I definitely recommend this as a witty and entertaining movie.

Rating:
Summary: hilarious!
Review: This movie is great! It is losely based on a true story about 2 bank robbers who escaped from prison and began sleeping over at the bank managers houses the night before they robbed the bank so that they could get a meal and a place to sleep. That is what Joe (Bruce Willis) and Terry (Billy Bob Thorton) do - sleep at bank managers houses and then rob the banks the next morning before the banks even open. Along the way they pick up a stunt man who drives the getaway car and a mentally unhinged woman on the run from her marriage (Cate Blanchett). Billy Bob Thorton is hilarious! Probably the funniest role I have ever seen him play. he plays an obsessive compulsice hypochondriac with a scroll of diagnosis'. Great date movie since guys and girls will find it funny!

Rating:
Summary: A soggy rehash of a lot of cliches with very few sparks.
Review: There have been enough heist films to do a weeklong twenty-four seven film festivals with no repeats. Playing at 4 am on Tuesday morning, you'll find Bandits, a take on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with post-Sopranos psychological drama, but light and fluffy as any comedy. The real gift of a lot of crime pictures is their ability to make us care about the con men who feature. The good crime films bring enough charm and righteousness to the criminals to make us root for them. So if a film in this genre is to succeed, it must make us like the heroes.

Bandits on the other hand, features Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton as two convicts doing time in the pokey. The former is sort of a zen redneck who fluctuates between incredible smoothness and hippie vapidity. That's either the character or Bruce himself, it's hard to tell which. Thornton, on the other hand, is an uptight, anal-retentive hypochondriac who prizes himself for his brains.

One day in the yard, Bruce Willis steals a cement mixer, and gets Billy Bob to jump in with him at the last minute as he rams the gate while prison-guard ammo bounces like hail from the vehicle. A high-speed chase ensues in which the fugitives evade the law, switching up cars every two-minutes of filmtime. In need of money, they hold up a bank and escape with a lot of loot.

At last, they have a moment to breathe, having successfully escaped another round of police. "What will we do?" asks Billy Bob. "I have a cousin in Mexico," says Bruce. Like the proverbial Canadian girlfriend, we never meet this cousin, but the two bank robbers hang their hopes on going south of the border at the end of their capers to buy a nightclub and run it in style.

But first, they need more money, and so they begin a brilliant scheme of robbing banks by kidnapping the bank manager the night before the heist, sleeping in their generally nice houses, and then going to work with upper management early in the morning to empty the vaults before the bank even opens for business. The scheme works for them, and, in fact, they gain national fame as the "sleepover bandits." As usual, the nation falls in love with them. Since the nation does, the viewer doesn't have to. I didn't feel the compunction myself. Nothing is to keep the pair from running off after a heist or two, thus ending the crime spree and the movie. The movie, therefore, has Willis behave as a spendthrift so that they have to keep robbing more banks in order to bankroll their escape from the country. This continued crime spree necessitates, in turn, extremely sluggish law enforcement.

Director TK uses the good trick of simply not having any scenes with cops in them in order to forestall the conclusion that the police are simply not trying to catch these guys. The other thing is that a red herring, a new plot, rather, is introduced in the form of Kate Blanchet as Kate.

Kate is a wild-hearted woman married to a man who is so insensitive as to be unmistakably fictional. She runs afoul of Billy Bob when he tries to carjack her and she plows into him. Threats of violence do not dissuade her from getting involved with Bruce and Billy. With nothing left to lose in life (after all, if your marriage is passionless, what else is there possibly to live for?) Kate is not afraid and winds up in romantic involvement with the smoother side of Bruce Willis.

Willis has another friend, too. This guy drives their getaway car, but he's an amateur special effects stuntman. Which proves to be a very handy hobby later in the movie. Billy Bob is unhappy that all these other people are getting involved, and he gets antsy and whiny until a heist separates the quartet and Billy ends up with Kate, and not just as two passengers in a stolen car. Kate somehow finds Billy's sniveling highly attractive. Being a confused woman, she confuses self-pity and neurosis with sensitivity. She decides that Billy is actually a sweet guy, not a hair-trigger nut with bad luck in clothing. The script doesn't delve into her demons that cause her to fall in love with Billy, though.

Instead, it delves into what happens when the love triangle's sides all meet. Friction, that's what. But it's a happy ending whereby Kate convinces the two bandits that she can't choose between them and wants them both. Nothing graphic happens between the three. That would put this movie in the ground-breaking realm of a pic like Y Tu Mama Tambien. Instead, the relationships cool way off, but remain in a generally triangular shape.

Anyway, how can a movie spend so much time (and I mean so much time) on relationships when it has a big finale to build up to? And yet, this film manages that, and more. Bobby Sleighton does a lot of camera time as the host of a popular reality teevee show about criminals. He actually is kidnapped by the sleepover bandits and given an interview at gunpoint. This lets a lot of backstory and exposition come out in stylishly shot MTV/Blair Witch looking footage. The movie actually spends quite a bit of time on television, which is just so interesting to note how influential television is. Come to think of it, what could have helped Butch Cassidy more than if it had taken place when there was television and the two robbers could have seen their faces on a store-window television just before jumping off that cliff?

Incidentally, do I live in the wrong town or what? I have not seen televisions in a store window in about 20 years in any town in the United States. I'm travelling to Hong Kong, Bangkok, Denpensar, and Singapore later this month, and I'll keep an eye out, though.

Finally, something big and exciting happens. It's not as clever as the end of The Sting, but few things are. Instead, we get a sort of ars poetica, a statement on the art of filmmaking embedded within this film. You could look at it that way. Or it could just be the easiest path to a happy ending for these characters that at least the U.S. of the movie itself cares about.

In so many words, I guess I'm saying that I thought this movie deserves a lot of credit for trying.

Rating:
Summary: Don't watch this movie unless you want to laugh...
Review: It's very hard to find a good comedy that, like yaakov98 down below says, doesn't succumb to gratuitous sex, violence, and foul langugage. Most comedies are about a laugh an hour this one kept my whole family wanting more at the end. I suggest you don't listen to any of these reviews and just watch the movie for yourself. You wouldn't be reading this if you didn't want to.
Billy Bob Thorton has the funniest lines in this movie.

Rating:
Summary: Good Acting
Review: I've always liked Bruce Willis, I think Billy Bob Thornton is a very good actor, and I've always thought Cate Blanchett should have won the Oscar for "Elizabeth." I think Cate was mis-cast in this movie. Even though I admire her acting very much, I didn't see her as a woman who would cause two men to fight over her as they did.

Thornton's character was the most interesting. He was a hypochondriac who listened to cassette tapes about diseases and carried a Merck manual with him.

Sort of like Bonnie and Clyde, they rob banks. But they don't kill. The ending caught me by surprise - a bit of a twist there.

Rating:
Summary: funny and entertaining!
Review: funny smart comedy. I loved the ending. don't want to spoil it for you if you haven't seen it yet. two thumbs up!

Rating:
Summary: Really BORING
Review: this dvd had me intrested so i bought it it was A HUGE mistake DO not buy this movie was very boring except for a couple of scenes but those were probably a 3 overall the movie stinks dont buy it

Rating:
Summary: Steal away
Review: "Bandits" doesn't seem entirely sure whether it wants to be a quirky screwball film or a crime drama. So it tries for both, and achieves neither. Billy Bob Thornton and Cate Blanchett keep this ship from sinking completely, but my words to "Bandits" are: Steal away.

The film opens with an in-over-their-heads bank robbery, then switches to flashbacks. Joe (Bruce Willis) is a courteous thug with anger issues, and Terry (Billy Bob Thornton) is a neurotic hypochondriac; both are in the same prison. One day Joe masterminds a quickie escape using a cement truck, and the two fugitives quickly hole up in a suburban house with two teens to avoid capture. Their plan? Steal enough money to open a resort in Mexico.

With the help of Joe's cousin, they soon become the "sleepover bandits," who hold up the bank manager in the evening and the bank the next morning. It seems pretty simple until a frustrated, pretty, immensely weird housewife named Kate (Cate Blanchett first hits Terry with her car then attaches herself to the bandits (in more ways than one). But with both of them in love with the same woman, and their usual plans gone awry, something has to give.

"Bandits" is at its best when it's quirky, but the crime caper ideas are all wrong. The movie sparkles when the "sleepover bandits" are eating dinner with their hostages, dealing with lovestruck policemen, or handling a bank manager who passes out at the drop of a hat. But between the love triangle and the grim flash-forwards, the movie becomes unbalanced fairly quickly.

The direction is okay; the script has a lot of good lines, but they sometimes are hard to find amid the usual been-there-done-that stuff. Blanchett usually gets the best ones, such as the anecdote about the jaw-dislocating kiss. The physical comedy (Blanchett running down Thornton, then whacking him with the car door) is good, as is the concept of the "sleepover bandits."

Bruce Willis appears to be sleepwalking as Joe, even when supposedly filled with rage. (His sole really amusing moments are when he's being abnormally courteous and ethical) Billy Bob Thornton is immensely likable and entertaining, an antique-phobic hypochondriac, until he falls for Kate, at which point he becomes less interesting. Cate Blanchett steals the show completely, especially in her first scene (where she drums and dances along to a rock song in the kitchen) as the weird and unhappy housewife with a clod for a husband.

"Bandits" could easily have been a fairly good comedy, or a moderately good crime movie. But it aspires to be both, and succeeds as neither. Only Blanchett and Thornton keep this from being another big theft.

Rating:
Summary: Clever, quirky, action-packed fun
Review: Don't listen to what anyone else says. You've got to give this movie a chance. I did, and completely LOVED it! If you've got a penchant for clever, quirky, action-packed films you'll probably agree.

The script is brilliant, the plot is unique and entertaining, and the characters are all very likeable. Billy Bob Thornton gives a fantastic performance as Terry Collins. And, for once, we can appreciate a Bruce Willis action-movie that entertains WITHOUT all the blood and violence that is so typical of many of his other movies. Cate Blanchett is an amazing actress. If you watch her interview in the bonus feature, you won't believe it's the same person that plays Kate Wheeler in the movie. WOW!

Make sure to watch for "Beavers and Ducks!" -- arguably the most hilarious line in the entire movie.