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The Whole Nine Yards
(***)
At the heart of The Whole Nine Yards is a spirit so infectiously humorous you can't help but be drawn in. It isn't a great movie, but it's clear that the actors involved were having such a great time it's impossible to not find something to like.
Matthew Perry plays "Oz" Oseransky, a good natured dentist who lives a miserable existence at the hands of his French Canadian wife Sophie (Arquette). His assistant Jill (Peet) helpfully points out that she'd kill her for real cheap. One day his life seems to get worse when his new neighbor Jimmy "The Tulip" Tudeski moves in. Tudeski is a former hitman for the Gogolak gang in Chicago, until he sold them out for a reduced prison sentence. Now he's out and in hiding until Sophie cons Oz into going to Chicago to rat him out to Janni Gogolak (Pollak).
Oz learns to like Jimmy, and he really doesn't want to do this, but he's quickly picked up by henchman Frankie Figs (Duncan), an imposing but very polite hitman working for the Gogolaks. It's here we meet both Janni, who spits out a Hungarian accent as a comedic prop, and also Jimmy's wife (Henstridge), who Oz immediately falls in love with.
I said before that they were all having a great time. It's about murder, but there aren't too many bad guys around. Tudeski has killed 17 people, but "It's not important how many people I've killed. What's important is how I get along with the people who are still alive." George C. Scott once said that the greatest actors could be working, and if they're not having fun the audience isn't having fun. Notice Perry's performance. He often plays Oz as a bumbling nice guy, but without him getting to annoying. He runs into Frankie at one point, and it takes Oz a good minute to recover from this shock. This couldn't have been scripted, but it works so beautifully.
The whole movie is like this. The plot isn't so important as the characters running through it. It'd be worth watching the movie again just to watch Amanda Peet as she meets Tudeski, who is her idol. Her young girl meeting her idol performance is priceless; she goes for an insanely funny character without it seeming cliche. It's that kind of work that defines a comedy like this, and it's for those reasons that The Whole Nine Yards is a must see.