Killers Anonymous

My assumption is that John Dahl has a greater gift for authentic noir than any other current director. Maybe he should stick to it. In his latest, You Kill Me, which at least has noir elements, he improves (and this corresponds to Metacritic's estimates of the reviews) over his non-noir 1998 Rounders and 2005 The Great Raid, but still falls well below his early and purer neo-noir triumphs, The Last Seduction (1994), Red Rock West (1992)—and his 1989 Metacritic-unrated debut Kill Me Again—the most authentically nourish of all and the better for it. Dahl peaked in The Last Seduction, which twists the genre triumphantly with its hilarious vagina dentata queen bee played with such gusto by Linda Fiorentino. That was where Dahl had it all, with the noir tricks fully in place—the double-crosses, the deceptions, the loser: and it was mean, but it was funny too. Where did that magic go? I think he's trying to get it back in You Kill Me, but he doesn't quite succeed.

Dahl was lucky with the casts he found for his noir films, and adroit in using them. In his new one—a noir comedy, which might or might not be an oxymoron—he's got a virtuoso in the lead: Ben Kingsley is Frank, a contract killer in Buffalo whose alcoholism causes him to botch a very important hit. His Polish gang boss (Philip Baker Hall) sends him out to California—touchy-feely rehab land—to dry out. The premise seems contrived and slight, not so much a plot as a line to hang some jokes on; but there are some original characterizations and some good lines.

Once in San Francisco, Frank works part-time as an embalmer's assistant and tries to shape up. Back in the cold the Polish gang he works for is being devoured by an Irish one due to his botched assassination of its leader Edward O'Leary (Dennis Farina). Bill Pullman creates a totally new persona for himself as an odd and unscrupulous San Francisco realtor who's Frank's West Coast handler. Frank finds a low profile gay AA sponsor in Luke Wilson. Kingsley's initial exchanges with Wilson are droll, but Wilson's character is underdeveloped.

The story has fun with 12-stepping, yet treats it knowingly and sympathetically. Perhaps too much so: shouldn't humor about a killer be mean? You Kill Me manages to be dark yet sweet. The combination only occasionally works. The best moments are the encounters between Frank and his cool and ridiculously indulgent new girlfriend Laurel (Téa Leoni, also a producer of the film). The dry humane humor is a drop down from the hysterically funny cruelty Dahl achieved in The Last Seduction and the new film lacks the earlier one's strong narrative momentum.

Why doesn’t Dahl go back to pure noir? Well, it isn't fashionable. It may even be impossible. But out of place crooks bonding with locals isn't a new joke either. What gives You Kill Me watchability is the chance it provides to see Kingsley be funny—and to enjoy another good Dahl cast, several of whose members have been united under the noir banner before. But it feels like Dahl and crew tried to do too many things with too little time and money on this project. You Kill Me has a Metacritic rating of 64, on a current par with 1408, Blades of Glory and Surf's Up—just above Ocean's Thirteen, Disturbia, and Bug. It's certainly not a hit but it commands a certain degree of respect.

In You Kill Me Ben Kingsley goes to Alcoholics Anonymous so he can go on killing because heavy drinking has impaired his ability to carry out his hits. But in Bruce A. Evans' new thriller, Mr. Brooks, Kevin Costner attends AA meetings in an effort to stop offing people. Not a professional hit man like Kingsley's Frank but a serial killer, Mr. Brooks (Costner) sees his killings—with some reason—as addictive behavior.

Genteel killers like Mr. Brooks, it seems, don't need to be locked up; a few 12-step meetings will suffice. Brooks doesn't admit to the meeting that he kills people (as Frank does to his): he just says he's an "addict." Though he's never taken on a role like this before, Costner isn't slumming in this movie: he's gentrifying a normally grizzly role. This serial killer is a thoroughly respectable citizen, Portland's Man of the Year no less, and a successful industrialist. And though he kills out of compulsion, he prides himself on the fineness of his technique. The film treats Brooks' killing sprees like the indulgence of a very dangerous and morally dubious hobby—a kind of extreme sport, perhaps suitable for some genre-bending TV reality show. Understandably however, he spends most of his time out of the office. Things are getting pretty complicated for him these days.

For one thing he has a smart and suavely gleeful alter ego named Marshall (William Hurt) constantly at his side, riding with him in his Volvo and egging him on teasingly to more killing. And not only is Mr. Brooks rich, but he's being sought (as "the thumbprint killer," though she doesn't know yet who that is) by a tireless and unusually lovely police detective, Tracy Atwood (Demi Moore)—who besides nerves of steel (but a pretty short fuse) just happens to be very rich herself.

At first the complications of Mr. Brooks are entertaining. Moore is involved in an unfriendly divorce, and her ex, a hunky philanderer, wants $5 million from her in settlement though he lived off her when they were married. She says in a meeting with lawyers that she'd like him dead. Okay. But then a young neighbor whom he calls Smith (Dan Cook) sees Costner commit a dual murder, his first return to action after two years of kill-sobriety, and Smith's so fired up by the excitement of watching it he wants to go along as an accomplice the next time, and he has incriminating photos to make Costner indulge him. Next Costner's primly named daughter Emma (Danielle Panabaker) drops out of Stanford and when she comes home it emerges that she, much like the son of an alcoholic, has the killer gene. She may have done someone in at school; who'll she off next?

Isn't this a bit too much? Everyone in Portland seems to be into offing people. But still there's more—or rather, Demi. She's not only pondering the new thumbprint killing, but also pursuing, and pursued by, a recently escaped murderer, "the hanging killer" (Matt Schulze), who's sworn to get her for putting him away. This guy isn't suave, he's ultra violent, one of those hop-heads on steroids.

At this point it begins to seem Costner needs Hurt to talk to just so they can keep each other sane. They do appear calmer and more rational than anybody else in the movie.

Even though Mr. Brooks' writers got carried away, Costner and Hurt make such beautiful music together in their smart and savvy conversations, sometimes punctuated by a sly laugh, you're conned into feeling the proceedings are making sense. And while they keep up the IQ level, Demi Moore keeps up the aesthetic one. Ms. Moore, as noted, remains beautiful to look at. She ages—hardly at all—like a fine Chinese vase, or like a leading lady of French cinema. Not a very fragile vase, though: she can also drop a burly man at five paces. (I remember her turning cartwheels on a late night talk show when she was heavily pregnant.)

In the movies you can't just kill people: there has to be a gimmick, and in Mr. Brooks there are a few too many. But it's still an elegant thing with nice music, a glossy look. Costner has made a commendably edgy choice in this role, even though it doesn't require him to get his hands dirty—just a little bloody. The film's Metacritic rating? Only 45, because most critics had to say it's preposterous. And they were right. But it's just as much fun to watch as Dahl's You Kill Me, and scarier, even though Metacritic gave the latter a more respectable score.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.