Film Reviews

Kill List

• Rating:
• Director: Ben Wheatley
• Starring: Michael Smiley
• Details: UK / 95mins (18).

What the hell happened to Kill List? For over eighty of its ninety-five minutes, this tense thriller was easily one of the best movies of the year. Then it takes a sudden and ill-advised left turn and it all falls apart big time. The best advice one can give if you're thinking of going along to this is to keep an eye on your watch and skip out around the eighty minute mark; leave it any longer and Kill List won't be the little piece of genius it was.
Jay (Maskell) and Shel (Buring) are a married couple struggling through the recession. Jay, an Iraq War veteran hasn't worked in eight months and financial troubles are beginning to tear the family apart. Enter Jay's buddy Gal (Smiley – most memorable as Spaced's Tyres) who wants Jay to join him on his latest 'job': turns out Jay and Gal are hired killers and are given a 'kill list' by an anonymous businessman. However, as the two friends make their way down the list, strange things keep cropping up. At every hit, the victim takes Jay's bullet gladly and even whispers 'thank you.' Has it to with Gal's new girlfriend (Fryer) scrawling a pagan symbol on the back of Jay's bathroom mirror? Could be, but there's other weird stuff going on too…
Sounds intriguing, right? And it is… for the most part. It's getting harder and harder to come up with something fresh for a hitman movie. Grosse Point Blank injected comedy, The Magician was a mockumentary, and You Kill Me was delightfully oddball. Kill List finds its own niche: a hitman movie with touches of a domestic drama, the supernatural and horror. Director Ben Wheatley, who also wrote the script, manages to juggle all the elements without diluting any; opening with an awkward blazing argument between Jay and Shel, the director manages to keep that tension throughout.
It's not often you see a film rated 18s but Kill List's violence deserves it. One particular scene sees Jay dispense with his gun and take a hammer to one victim's hands, knees and head. It's gruesome stuff to say the least and the special effects here are realistic. The performances can't be faulted either: Jay and Shel look and sound like a married couple on the brink of separation and Jay and Gal make believable best buds. Everything was working so brilliantly. So what happened?
The trouble is this review can't get into why and how the movie dips so suddenly in the run-in for spoiler reasons. Suffice to say, it was a terrible decision by Wheatley to go down this road – this plot twist should have been on Jay and Gal's kill list too. What a disappointment.

Review by Gavin Burke