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Bandits
Release Date: April 2, 2002
Run Time: approximately 2 Hours and 3 minutes
Rated PG-13
Ten-second Rundown: In this romantic comedy, Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton are bank robbers with a gimmick. They kidnap the bank manager the night before and then rob the bank the next morning. All goes well until Cate Blanchett comes between them and starts singing the Footloose soundtrack.
Extras:Alternate Ending Inside Bandits Featurette Movie trailer Creating Scene 71 Featurette 4 Deleted Scenes Standard and Widescreen version Dolby Digital sound. English, French, Spanish and Portuguese subtitles. It is a good day when a new Bruce Willis DVD shows up at the Fanboy Planet office. Oh sure, gone are the days of kick ass movies like Die Hard and lord knows we suffered through Story of Us, but all in all the arrival of Bandits on DVD was very much anticipated. We reviewed the movie back when it was released in the theater and really enjoyed it. With the promise of an alternate ending and deleted scenes, I was eager to jump in. For the most part, I wasn't disappointed.
First of all, the movie is good. I won't bother citing why since you can read our dead on review. The movie is just as enjoyable in DVD as it was in the theater. The jokes and action all still come across in the way director Barry Levinson intended.
The best feature on the DVD is the Inside Bandits documentary about how the film was made. Bruce Willis and Billy Bob talk about how they got their roles in the film (did you know that Val Kilmer was signed to play Joe and that Bruce was going to play Terry originally?) Barry Levinson talks about why he got involved and what drew him to the movie. Producer Michael Birnaum provides insight into the real life bank robbers that provided the idea the movie is based on as well as the creation of the script. It's a very enjoyable documentary and worth the 20-30 minutes it takes to watch it.
If you've watched a lot of deleted scenes on your DVDs, you can usually figure out why they were cut. The same holds true for Bandits. The four deleted scenes don't really add or take away from the movie. For the most part they are simply cut for pacing. One interesting thing in the deleted scenes is that a small plot element is cut from the first bank robbery they do. The bank manager that they kidnap has been having an affair and while Joe (Bruce) and Terry (Billy Bob) take his family hostage in their home, the other woman shows up to spill the beans to the wife. Good stuff.
The Creating Scene 71 is interesting if only to see how the bedroom scene between Joe and Kate (Cate) evolved. Most of it was improvised and they show a lot of the stuff they didn't use.
Last was the big alternate ending which was a massive let down. The alternate ending is about 15 seconds long and only changes one small detail from the real ending. When I think alternate ending, I want to see a whole different take on the movie, not just a cosmetic change.
If you haven't seen Bandits, then it's a disc worth getting. If you saw the movie in the theater and enjoyed it then it's still a disc worth getting, but I'd wait until the price drops to around 15 bucks. Until the next Bruce Willis movie…
