TheRetroCritic

At this point The Coen Brothers could pretty much do anything and I'd zombie my way to the cinema without thinking twice about it. With Gambit , a remake of sorts, it looked like they might have written another farce in the vein of The Ladykillers , a film which I've always felt was wrongly underrated. Alas, they aren't on directing duty this time... We follow Colin Firth's art curator as he hires Cameron Diaz's rodeo queen to help him pull off an elaborate heist involving a rare Monet painting. The goal being to piss off Alan Rickman's odious art collector and make quite a few bucks in the process. The film is going for a 60's-style screwball comedy vibe and with a strong cast like this one and a script by the Coens, you'd expect nothing less than a sharp, fun, clever little flick. Sadly, whatever wit we found in the likes of Fargo and whatever cartoonish shenanigans we found in The Ladykillers are nowhere to be seen in Gambit. Sure the film o

Colin Firth excels once more with this new, highly lauded effort and provides us with yet another pitch-perfect, smart performance. The film itself is confident, entertaining, well made and amusing if not quite as Earth-shattering as the critics claim. Then again it's Oscar season so why wouldn't they exaggerate a tad? Truthfully, there's not much to this film. Here we have the usual template for a character study: man has problem, gets someone to solve it, problem solved. The journey is very pleasant though and there are good performances all around, especially from Firth and Rush. The film only slightly falters when it attempts to be too cute, which happens a few times and isn't completely necessary as the situation highlighted here is whimsical enough without piling on the "lols". Not much more to say about that one really: it's good, a tad forgettable and of course overrated but good. It's never quite clear what the film is trying to conve