Usually, people don't like having the metaphorical wool pulled over their eyes. But it's a guarantee you'll never enjoy it as much as you do in "Bandits."
The first five minutes of the film establishes that Terry Collins (Billy Bob Thornton) and Joe Blake (Bruce Willis), otherwise known as the Sleepover Bandits, have been killed while holding up a bank in Los Angeles after their mutual girlfriend, Kate Wheeler (Cate Blanchett), turned them in.
The film then jumps back a few months and spends the next hour and forty-five minutes setting up one of the most satisfying movie endings this year.
After escaping from an Oregon prison, Terry and Joe rob banks down the Pacific coast on their way to Mexico by scoping out small-town institutions and making themselves at home with the bank manager at night so they can rob the bank in the morning.
The bumbling pair actually pulls off several of these heists, but when disgruntled housewife Kate enters the picture, Terry and Joe's partnership is threatened by the politics of love.
Is this turn of events predictable? Yes. Do they spend way too much time figuring out who gets the girl? Of course. But the rest of the film is so charmingly hysterical that it nearly makes up for the formulaic blunders.
Blanchett and Thornton both give fabulous performances. Blanchett has a role that a thousand women before her have had -- the spurned, frustrated wife. But she gives Kate a spunky vulnerability, so when she sings Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" through heaving sobs, it's genuinely touching, rather than manipulating.
