Bruce Willis stars in The Whole Nine Yards, from 2000, as a hit man who moves next door to a law-abiding dentist (Matthew Perry) with marriage and money troubles. The dentist’s contemptuous wife (Rosanna Arquette) urges him to rat out the hit man, for a price, to an enemy gangster, but the dentist intends no harm. And Arquette secretly wants him to die. Boy, does the threat of violence pervade.

Director Jonathan Lynn‘s and scriptwriter Mitchell Kapner‘s film is an effective comedy of killing and treachery, and it beats the blazes out of woke comedies. It has nothing to say but is not a thumbsucker. The plot Kapner offers is flawed but engaging. The flick is all commercial rawness. Perry is fun and supple; Arquette is raffishly dandy. Amanda Peet is committed and sapid and pretty nude. Wait, I mean she is a pretty nude.