A true moment of hilarious trash

Rating: 10/10 (16 June 2008)

To kidnap someone and get a ransom is not an easy thing and it takes professionals to do it clean and neat. An amateur crime entrepreneur needs money for some economic venture. He wants it from his father in law who will naturally refuse to give it. So that dear amateur contacts two hooligans who accept to kidnap the amateur's wife, the very daughter of the rich father in law, to get the money as a ransom. Since the man is a car dealer, they want a brand new car and thereafter everything will go wrong. On the way back from the kidnapping with the abducted woman in the back the two hooligans are stopped because they had not registered the car that had a Dealer plate. They kill the state trooper. Two witnesses come by. They are chased and killed. Then the car that was given away has a problem with its registration at the bank or some accounting firm because its serial number is not legible on some listing of sold cars. The father in law decides to deliver the money and he ends up dead, plus a parking lot warden dies too. In the mean time one of the two kidnappers who was taking care of the woman kills her because she is whimpering, and he kills his accomplice when he arrives without the money he has buried in the snow along some cattle fencing, which causes his being killed and then put through a wood-chipper by the first kidnapper. At this moment the pregnant female sheriff from Brainerd who has been investigating the death of the state trooper in the Twin Cities arrives and arrest one kidnapper. During that time the entrepreneurial car dealer is trying to cool it off when the police comes for him. He will end up arrested too. The best Jewish thriller ever produced. When everything turns wrong. The Coen Brothers are perfect witnesses for these flunkies drop-out failing losers who are loose in their brains and disjointed in everything else. It is the Biblical Job but without any divine dimension, without the excuse of being victimized or tested by God. Just one mishap on top of another and the impossibility to stop the sinking process. And the Coen Brothers by just over-highlighting the negative events transform a pathetic character and a pathetic situation into a real funny one, not funny to the point of laughing your heads off, but funny to the point of thinking "God bless me and thanks I am not like these idiots." A classic of sorts of the Jewish humor we like.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID