WHAT on earth has happened to the Coen brothers?

The consistently original producers of varied slices of weird and wonderful Americana such as Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and Fargo have now produced their second disappointment in a row.

But at least Intolerable Cruelty had George Clooney to keep us watching.

Their new release is an unfathomable choice, a remake of Alexander Mackendrick's final Ealing film, the 1955 classic The Ladykillers, in which a group of thieves disguise themselves as musicians in the home of a little old Victorian lady in order to carry out a robbery.

And this skeleton has been kept intact, except that we have Irma P Hall as Mrs Munsen, who, rather than being a little old lady, is an intimidatingly busty black Southern mamma.

Opening the film down the sheriff's office, registering a complaint about the "hippity-hop" music her neighbour is playing, she lives her life according to God and the spirit of her dead husband, who watches over her from a commanding portrait above the fireplace.

One day, the mellifluous Goldthwait Higginson Dorr PhD (Tom Hanks) arrives at her door asking to rent a room.

A bluffer in charge of a motley crue of random associates, including a chain-smoking General (Tzi Mai), trigger-happy waster (Marlon Wayans), dense muscleman (Ryan Hurst) and demolitions expert (JK Simmons), he intends, with their help, to burrow from her basement to the accounting offices of the local casino.

But what could have been an entertaining heist wherein the thieves fall apart and turn on each other, is more of a dull and unengaging two hours which will have Coen fans scratching their heads and wondering where the magic has gone.

A lot of the film rests on Hanks' performance, and since it's a deeply unfunny caricature based on a lot of monotonous waffling and weird teeth, there's not much hope for the rest of the film.

He hasn't even bothered to watch the original, something which has to be seen as a huge oversight - Alec Guinness might have taught him a valuable lesson on how to play funny/strange.

Wayans, who is best known for his role as Shorty in the Scary Movie franchise, demonstrates his limited skills by playing exactly that same character, minus the weed, and the rest of the baddies are equally irrelevant.

Apart from a few introductory sequences, we know nothing about their motivation or how such a random bunch got together in the first place.

The Coens are usually adept at finding laughs in the most unusual of places - a wood-chipper in Fargo, or the character of Wheezy Joe in Intolerable Cruelty - but here they seem reduced to the cheap laughs provided by someone with irritable bowel syndrome who breaks wind a lot.

It's just not enough on any level, making watching this murder for an audience, let alone the participants.