Jerry and Tom

A tedious, dialogue-intensive story about the vicissitudes of a mentor/protege hitman team, "Jerry & Tom" is a study in understatement with a pointless plot and an ending which may make you want to "whack" yourself for having watched the whole thing.

Tom (Mantega) and Jerry (Chaykin) are experienced hit men waiting in a bar for a phone call to do their next job who currently is tied up before them. We then jump back 10 years to find a much younger Jerry and Tom, and we trace their development throughout the years.

And that's the plot. There isn't a huge amount of plot here but plenty of story if you appreciate the difference. The story follows Jerry from a car salesman who gets accidentally involved in his first hit, through the years as he develops more and more of a taste for the killing, while Tom is heading the other way as the more mature hit man who is losing his taste for the whole thing. However the thin plot is greatly enriched by making the characters the story.

Of the two leads Jerry is the most interesting to watch as he changes the most notably over the film, but Mantegna's Tom is as good as a more stable foil for Jerry. The strength is in the wealth of wonderful characters that surround them. The various victims all have their amusing quirks and are well played by good actors (William H Macy, Ted Danson, Peter Riegert), while other supporting roles such as Vic and Billy (Durning and Chaykin) are great.

The whole story is bristling with comedy and style. The stories the characters tell and the things they say are brilliant, including flashback stories of Elvis, JFK and others are really funny, while other conversations (such as who play them in a movie - "Don Knotts!") are inspired in their hilarity but also their normality.

The director Saul Rubinek is very clever in his direction. We skip through time to other stories using editing that gently glides one scene into another - it's really effective and always clever. In fact he brings clever touches to all the film. Even the closing credit sequences have a wonderful old-fashioned feel to them as each character appears onscreen to wave to the audience - it's also a bit surreal given what we've just watched. I also admire the way that very little violence is show on screen - because that's not what this is about. The killing is often hinted at rather than shown and this allows us to focus on the stories and the comedy rather than the moral difficulty behind what you're seeing.

The film is funny throughout but it does have it's thoughtful moments and the conclusion is actually quite moving. The only faults with this is that the hit man genre is not exactly new ground and this type of story has been done before. Also some may find the lack of plot to be frustrating or boring and find themselves unable to enjoy the stories within.

Overall though, this is a light little gem that draws it's comedy from the stories and the characters within the film. This is filled with clever and funny touches from the opening bar scene right down to the old-fashioned credit scene and Danson's accreditation as "man who loved Vicki".

1st watched 4/1/2001 - 7 out of 10(Dir-Saul Rubinek): Witty, black comedy with terrific performances by Mantegna and Sam Rockwell. This is the kind of movie that is somewhat of a guilty pleasure because there are times when you're laughing as someone is getting killed or at least in the process of being killed. This is definetly the intent of filmmaker Saul Rubinek where there is a mix of normal guy(who happens to be a hitman)and hitmen(who just happen to own a used car lot). The movie starts out in the present as it appears Jerry and Tom are waiting to "do" another person, and then takes you back ten years to show you how Jerry got involved in the business that Tom already has been doing for many years. There isn't much morality here and really no lessons are taught but that's ok it's just a movie, and a pretty good one at that.

One has to have a morbid sense of humor to enjoy this wry black comedy about two used car salesmen who moonlight as contract killers. The comedy is very tongue in cheek as these two miscreants matter-of-factly whack a dozen or so marked men while bickering over trivialities.

The gag is funny at first, but wears thin as we are treated to minor variations on the same theme for an hour and a half. Other than some innovative scene transitions, the direction by veteran TV director Saul Rubinek was nothing special, except I suppose he made good use of a very limited budget. The story was taken from a play by Rick Cleveland, (`The West Wing' TV series) and Rubinek maintained the theatrical feel using simple sets and concentrating mainly on the actors.

Joe Mantegna is an excellent tough-guy character actor and conjures another terrific mobster. He is a tough but practical murderer who takes the task as strictly business and longs to get out of the game. Sam Rockwell is also good as his dim-witted cohort, who begins to like his work a bit too much. Charles Durning gives a droll performance as an over-the-hill hit man who wants to write a book about his targets. There are also cameos by William Macy, Ted Danson and Peter Riegert.

This is a better than average B movie with some acting performances that are worth seeing. I rated it a 6/10. It is funny in a perverse way, and Mantegna's performance is a treat.

I saw this on a premium channel and thought my wife and in-laws might actually enjoy it. But even though it's become a family joke, i liked it. The one charac- ter that has a development "arc" is played by the talented Sam Rockwell. No one seems to know how to cast this actor, so we may never see him in a major role in a movie with an actual budget, but he and the others (i particularly liked Ted Danson's contribution; funny stuff) do a great job with a low-key directing style by first time feature director Saul Rubinek. Think Brian DePalma in reverse. If you're here, you know what the movie's about, so i'll just say that, though not a Hall of Fame candidate, this is an enjoyable dark comedy with some excellent visual touches in transitions from scene to scene.