Monday, August 19, 2013

Kill List

the two hit men about to get way out of their depth...
one of the few non spoiler pictures of Kill List available on the internet
If you're a sensitive soul like me you should not watch Ben Wheatley's Kill List. I watched it last night and I was pretty darn disturbed. So disturbed that I stayed up for hours watching the utter head pounding banality of the live stream of Mike and Mike on ESPN2 in an attempt to get some of the images out of my mind. It didn't work. Even when they replaced one of the Mikes with a different guy who wasn't called Mike and Alex Rodriguez's insane attorney called in to the show with a crackpot conspiracy theory about the New York Yankees. And speaking of conspiracies... 
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As I've explained here before I have an empathy problem which prevents me from liking horror films. I wasn't prepared for Kill List's third act because I thought that the movie was going to be a conventional thriller about hit men. It isn't. About two thirds of the way in it goes in an entirely different direction. The acting is great, it's beautifully shot and if I were giving out stars I'd probably give it four and a half out of five but I don't really know who to recommend Kill List to. Horror film fans will probably find it too tame whereas thriller fans might not quite buy into the denouement and the scenes leading up to the denouement. I don't want to tell you any plot spoilers because surprise is a key element here but it's defintely got a sort of a (I'm going to put the following sentence in white text on a white background that you can only read if you deliberately highlight it) Pulp Fiction meets The Wicker Man vibe. Ok? 
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Neil Maskell was a fantastic leading man and it was really nice to see Michael Smiley, the actor who played "Tyres" in Spaced, giving a brilliant, low-key, brooding performance but I hope he doesn't mind if I prefer to think of him in Spaced and never try to think of anything in this film ever again.