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If you count the bulldog that gets snuffed out within the first 10 minutes, the latest flick from the Coen brothers has an even higher body count than Fargo’s. This is great news to Joel and Ethan fans, of course, as is the inclusion of villainous bowels, murderous dentures, and a psychotic cat named Pickles who chomps on a severed finger in a snickery nod to the wayward digit in The Big Lebowski. The oddball bros are at their best when they spill blood, and this visually and verbally rambunctious remake of a 1955 British heist comedy is no exception. It also helps that Tom Hanks has disconnected his phone and dusted off his comedic chops for the likably unlikable Southern dandy Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D., who’s played with equal parts goofy grandiloquence and snurfling Hannibal Lecter eee-vil. Dorr sweet-talks a God-fearing Southern granny, scowling Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall), into renting out her basement as a practice space for his Renaissance-music quintet. The band is a sham, however, and the not-so-mastermindful Dorr plans to tunnel through the loose Mississippi soil from Munson’s manse to the bank vault of the Bandit Queen riverboat casino. His partners in crime are a dysfunctional hoot: Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans), the street-cussin’ “inside man”; the General (Tzi Ma), the essentially mute tunnel man; Lump (Ryan Hurst), the dunderheaded muscle; and Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons), the explosives expert with the explosive intestinal tract. The fun, of course, is not in the doing but the undoing: Soon enough, the sturdy Munson finds out who’s schemin’ whom, and the bumbling Dorr & Co. are faced with the slippery task of killing her. The Coens keep the pace cruising with loop-de-loop camera tricks, twisted POVs (inside a football helmet, on top of a gargoyle…), and a rousing gospel score, and the kudzu-dripping dialogue is a quotable hoot (“Just pretend her head’s a casaba melon and the gun is a melon baller”). It gives away nothing to say that only one character is left standing at mayhem’s end: When Joel and Ethan are feeling wicked, you never know who’s gonna make it out alive. —Sean Daly