Grade: C-

Verdict: O Coen brothers, where art thou?

Has Hollywood ruined the Coen brothers?

Last year, there was the borderline-tolerable "Intolerable Cruelty," starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones. And starting today they're giving us the disappointing "The Ladykillers" with Tom Hanks.

Though threaded throughout with the brothers' (Joel and Ethan) trademark off-kilter humor, this film could've been made by any number of Hollywood hacks. There are more good jokes and ingenuity in the first 10 minutes of "Fargo," "Blood Simple" or a half-dozen other early Coen movies than there is in the entirety of "The Ladykillers."

A loose remake of a cunning little 1955 British black comedy starring Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers, the new version transfers the action from London to the Deep South. Hanks plays Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D., a grandiose pseudo-Southern gentleman of the Foghorn Leghorn school. He has a fondness for capes, a la John Wilkes Booth or John Carradine in "Stagecoach"; and flowery language a la almost anyone from a Tennessee Williams play. A hurt hand becomes "a maimed extremity" and a nice morning is "lovely, lovely camellia-scented."

Dorr has more in common with the criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty than he does with dear old Mr. Holland. Renting a room from God-fearing, church-going, Bob Jones University-supporting Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall), he pretends to use her cellar as a rehearsal space for his Renaissance quintet. In reality, he and his ill-chosen gang are tunneling toward ill-gotten gains -- the cash from a nearby casino.

The heist itself is a piece of cake compared with what happens next. Let's just say the widow Munson proves more formidable than any of them had imagined; hence, the title.

Hanks' cohorts are a dismal array of charmless clichès: Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans), a potty-mouthed rapper in dreadlocks; the General (Tzi Ma), an unsmiling chain-smoker from South Vietnam with a war's worth of experience digging tunnels; Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons), an officious and accident-prone explosives expert; and Lump (Ryan Hurst), a big-lug football player with a head thicker than the walls of Mrs. Munson's cellar.

This DOA bunch is especially disappointing, given the Coens' gift for creating unique and unforgettable characters like Marge from "Fargo," Ed Crane from "The Man Who Wasn't There" and the immortal and underrated title character of "Barton Fink." So are the jokes, many of which involve irritable bowel syndrome and the piles.

As Ms. Munson might say, God bless Hanks for taking on this burden of a movie and doing everything humanly possible to make it work. He can't save it -- some films just aren't salvageable -- but he's created a memorable character, with the honey-rich drawl of an Augusta National Golf Club member and the sniveling, ratty laugh of a lonely community college professor who knows more about the star-nosed mole than anyone else in the world.

An unhappy incongruence of the Coen brothers' distinctive style and the limits of the studio system, "The Ladykillers" is less a movie than a vehicle for a spiffy gospel soundtrack that's likely to be as popular as the Grammy-winning mountain music for "O Brother, Where Art Thou?". The rocking gospel song that opens the film has an incessant and compelling refrain: "Let's go back to God..."

Hey, guys, let's go back to independent movies.