The 2000s Movie Project: 'The Whole Nine Yards'

The latest entry in the 2000s Project, in which we are analyzing the film trends and topics of this young century, is among the first big comedy hits of the 2000s, The Whole Nine Yards. Released on February 18, 2000, the film grossed more than $100 million dollars on an admittedly steep $41 million dollar budget, most of which went to pay for Bruce Willis’s smirk and silly hat budget.

The Whole Nine Yards is actually a vehicle for Matthew Perry and the only time he appeared to be close to being a bankable comedy star. Perry plays Oz, a dentist living in Montreal with his shrew of a wife, played by a slumming Rosanna Arquette. Oz’s backstory is bizarre and over-complicated. This clumsily delivered backstory includes something about a former dental practice partner who was also his wife’s father who accumulated a lot of debt before killing himself. None of this matters really.

The plot kicks in when Oz meets his new neighbor and recognizes him as famed mob hitman Jimmy "The Tulip" Tudeski (Bruce Willis). He tries to pretend he doesn’t know who Jimmy is, but he makes the unfortunate mistake of telling his wife who Jimmy is and she pushes the plot along by forcing Oz to go to Chicago to try and turn Jimmy in to his former mob boss, Jonni Gogo (Kevin Pollak). Her hope is that Oz will get a reward or get killed, either works for her.

Somehow, Jimmy is already aware of what it is Oz has been made to do and he begins a counter-setup that has Oz and Jimmy’s old pal Frankie (Michael Clarke Duncan) convincing Jonni to come to Montreal to kill Jimmy who, knowing he’s coming, will instead kill Jonni. It is explained that Oz’s wife had told Jimmy that Oz was ratting him out, but it remains a fully convoluted set up. The Whole Nine Yards is sloppy in that way average movies are, creating logical rabbit holes that only the charm of the movie can get you to ignore.

Before Jimmy’s plan can come together things take a minor twist as Oz meets Jimmy’s former-current wife Cynthia (Natasha Henstridge) and he falls immediately in love. Jimmy wants to kill Cynthia over money and this places Oz in an even bigger squeeze. This romance angle gets desperately rushed though Amanda Peet, who isn’t part of this portion of the story, has a scene late in the film that actually makes this plot kind of work. Kind of... it’s still very rushed.

Amanda Peet, the definition of a scene stealer. Peet appears to be having a blast in the role of Oz’s dental assistant who has a big secret she’s keeping from him. Let’s just say, she’s a big fan of Jimmy "The Tulip." Peet is the most memorable part of The Whole Nine Yards for a reason that, in hindsight, is a tad problematic. Peet performs a complete nude scene that is, to say the least, gratuitous. It’s genuinely creepy the way that director Jonathan Lynn’s camera lingers on Peet’s breasts.

It would be disingenuous to say that I don’t enjoy looking at Peet, but as we evolve our culture, it would be equally disingenuous to pretend that such a scene isn’t problematic. Stranger still is looking back at interviews with Peet at the time of the film’s release and how everyone except Peet talks about the nude scene with director Lynn expressing a great appreciation for the "funny nude scene." Is the scene funny? Kind of, but for the most part, it’s about ogling Peet, something that gets an extra bit of proof when Duncan’s Frankie closes the scene by creepily staring Peet up and down in a too long look and bit of dialogue.

Putting aside the problematic nude scene, I can say that there are other pleasures to The Whole Nine Yards, indeed there are a few pretty big laughs in the movie. Among the biggest are some of Willis’s offhand comments about his past as a killer. I really enjoyed a scene of Willis and Perry slowly becoming friends for Willis’s effortlessly menacing charm. Willis’s relaxed delivery could be mistaken for disinterest at times, but I didn’t sense that in this scene.

As for Matthew Perry, this is a relatively standard performance for the former Friends star. Perry is all nervous energy, constantly tripping over himself in his desperate, sweaty attempts to get a laugh. To his credit, Perry earns plenty of laughs in The Whole Nine Yards. The film doesn’t manage to turn Perry into a bankable leading man, but on its own, the movie is funny because of the well-deployed use of Perry’s best gifts as a performer—his nervous physicality and self-deprecation.

The oddity I mentioned before comes from director Jonathan Lynn and screenwriter Mitchell Kapner. Director and writer can’t resist inserting sitcomic running gags into The Whole Nine Yards that have nothing to do with the rest of the plot. Both Lynn and Kapner appear to find the idea of mayonnaise on a hamburger inherently hilarious as a Canadian-ism they insist on commenting upon with a rib poking, "Can you believe these non-Americans?" And, really, no actual punchline.

And then there is all of the dental imagery and humor in The Whole Nine Yards. Oz is a dentist and the film opens, quite bizarrely and off-puttingly on insane close ups of Matthew Perry’s mouth as he goes through his tooth brushing ritual. You can count Perry’s taste buds, that’s how strange these close ups are and we are left to wonder... why? Why is this how a movie about a mob hitman and his dentist pal opens up?

This isn’t even the only dentistry running gag in The Whole Nine Yards. The movie makes multiple references to the alleged high rate of suicides among dentists. Why this is supposed to be funny or is even mentioned is beyond me. This repeated gag about suicide never earns a laugh no matter how many times it is brought up in The Whole Nine Yards. The film may have even played a role in propagating the lie about dentists and suicides which according to the CDC is not really all that notable.

I can’t say I truly dislike The Whole Nine Yards as I laughed a lot during the movie. Amanda Peet is an absolute delight and Matthew Perry works very hard to wring laughs from his usual schtick. Those good things, however, are equalled by some really bad choices. Those choices include the rushed and forced romance between Perry and Henstridge, Kevin Pollak’s remarkably unfunny villain with the running gag about being unable to pronounce the letter J, and a series of awful, flat, bad sitcom gags.