Bandits (DVD)

Bandits is not really a bad film. It's too long, certainly, and contains several elements which were clearly just included to placate Mr. Willis. But a day or two in the editing suite and I'm sure they could come up with a killer cut for the anniversary DVD release. 'Special truncated edition', I can almost see HMV posters screaming. Unlikely, you say? Bah, spoilsports. Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton escape from prison and decide to rob lots of banks to fund a Mexican nightclub. As they seem to be very lazy men, they hit on the idea of kidnapping bank managers, staying at their houses overnight and forcing them to empty the vaults before the ...  Read the complete review

HOW IT ALL STARTED It was one of those Saturday nights that have all the potential to turn a nice marriage into something ugly and nasty. Honey met some friends to watch Rugby at the pub (which is fine by me, really) and was a bit drunk when he got home. Nevertheless, the best husband of all times insisted on helping with dinner and promptly ruined it all - well, it still tasted fine, but it didn't look very nice and it was not the way I had it all planned. Now I am SURE that you all know, that I, personally, am neither a perfectionist nor a drama queen, honestly, but I simply couldn't help pushing my food rather dispiritedly around my plate. This, of ...  Read the complete review

If you have seen 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid', you might think that this is all old news, but 'Bandits' is actually quite a good thing. I think - to paraphrase Tom Lehrer - that movies are like sewers: what you get out of them depends on what you put into them. Having barely paid attention to the trailers and decided to see the movie on the basis of Billy Bob and Cate Blanchett being in the cast, I was expecting lots of dumb one-liners, silly action sequences and stuntmen-a-go-go. But no. A lot of the film is concerned with quirky, almost bizarre character comedy. The set-up is relatively straightforward - Bruce Willis and Billy Bob ...  Read the complete review

There's a great scene early on in Bandits, in which the two bank robbers, having broken into the house, sit and eat dinner with the bank manager's family. It's a moment of pure comedy in a film that isn't entirely sure what it wants to be. There are touches of humour throughout, as well as attempts at romance, drama and suspense, but ultimately it falls short in every department. We all know Barry Levinson can do comedy - 'Wag the Dog' was almost an exercise in satire - but he disappoints with this film, despite a couple of great acting performances. Following an unbelievably easy jailbreak, Joe (Bruce Willis) and Terry (Billy Bob ...  Read the complete review

It took me a few minutes to figure out what this movie was about. The movie starts with one of those crime-story shows about a group of bank robbers who have come to be known as the Sleepover Bandits. (I’ll explain later.) The next scene is of two of the soon-to-be bank robbers (Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton) breaking out of jail. We quickly learn that Terry (Thornton’s character) is a hypochondriac and that Joe (Willis’s character) tends towards the macho and impulsive. When Terry soon realizes that they need cash, Joe decides that he’s going to rob a bank with a highlighter from a stolen car. After the heist, Terry does some ...  Read the complete review