February 21, 2000 -- Contract killers are generally not considered good comic material, but "The Whole Nine Yards" tries mightily to make it work. Although it is cleverly written, well-cast, and the performances are very good to excellent, I'm not sure it really succeeds in pulling off this trick.

It is an attempt at screwball comedy, with everyone being played against type. You've got the down-on-his-luck dentist Nick "Oz" Oseransky (well-played by Matthew Perry of "Almost Heroes") meeting his new next-door neighbor, Jimmy Jones a.k.a. "Jimmy the Tulip Tudeski" (well-played by Bruce Willis of "The Sixth Sense"). Although Oz is scared to death of Jimmy, the two hit it off and become friends. It's a good thing, too, because people that Jimmy don't like have a way of disappearing, for good.

The plot becomes ridiculously complicated when a bunch of Chicago mobsters becomes involved, Oz falls in love with a woman who has a $10 million price on her head and Oz winds up with a price on his head as well. Throw in an undercover cop and even more complications we won't go into here and it ends up being a real madcap romantic comedy.

Oz is basically a decent guy who is surrounded by killers. He doesn't want to kill anybody, while most of the people around him, even people he thought he knew, have no compunctions about killing anybody that gets in their way. Oz is forced into the position of agreeing, at least in part, to some of these killings, in order to keep his own body and soul together.

So many people are killed in this movie, including an undercover cop who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, that the story ceased to be funny after a while. The story crosses the line from madcap, or screwball comedy to dark or black comedy. Oz is a decent guy, but by the end of the film there is a lot of blood on his hands because he is up to his eyeballs in a plot to keep murderers from justice. The story is more like a tragedy, a loss of innocence, dressed up as a comedy. The boundary lines of traditional morality have been pushed so far they break. Oh, and there's some nudity and sex, too, for those of you worried about that stuff.

Still, there are a lot of funny scenes and lines in this movie. In addition to good performances by Willis and Perry, Amanda Peet ("One Fine Day") is very good as Jill, the dental assistant, and Michael Duncan (who received an Oscar nomination for his role in "The Green Mile"), plays hit man Frankie Figs, and Natasha Henstridge (of "Species II") plays the love interest, Cynthia. Director Jonathan Lynn, who previously directed "My Cousin Vinny" keeps the story moving along nicely. Writer Mitchell Kapner ("Romeo Must Die") also plays a waiter in the movie. This film rates a B.

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