All Killers, Mostly Filler

My thoughts on Greedy People, The Killer and Strange Darling

All Killers, Mostly Filler

Set in a small island town off the coast of South Carolina, Greedy People begins with recent arrival Will (Himesh Patel) about to begin his first day of work as a police officer, only to be teamed up with Terry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a blowhard cop who is more interested in cadging free coffees and nailing the occasional housewife than in doing much in the way of investigative work. With Terry off with the aforementioned housewife, Will misinterprets a police call, barges into a house on his own and inadvertently kills the housewife (Traci Lords—yes, Traci Lords) inside. While trying to restage the crime scene to make things look less incriminating for them, Will and Terry discover a million dollars in cash that they decide to take for themselves, hiding it away in a locked-up shed until the heat dies down and promising not to tell anyone. Without going too much further into detail, let us just say that the trust issues between the two eventually come to a head and their crime/cover up winds up including Will’s pregnant wife (Lily James), the dead woman’s husband (Tim Blake Nelson), his secret girlfriend (Nina Arianda), a local masseuse (Simon Rex), the town’s two competing hit men (Jim Gaffigan and Jose Maria Yazpik), the town’s sensible top cop (Uzo Aduba), a pissed-off ex of Terry’s (Joey Lauren Adams) and Will’s pet dog, few of whom are still standing by the time the end credits start rolling.

Although the screenplay by Mike Vukadinovich borrows liberally from any number of films—Training Day and A Simple Plan among them—the chief inspiration is clearly the entire oeuvre of the Coen Brothers, with titles like Blood Simple, Fargo and especially No Country for Old Men supplying the bulk of the inspiration. While Vukadinovich and director Potsy Ponciroli are certainly adept at aping the Coens in the broad strokes—colorful characters spouting arch dialogue, bizarre and unexpected plot developments, violence that seesaws between the cartoonish and the gruesome, the deployment of Tim Blake Nelson in a supporting role—it lacks both the genuine wit of their lighter efforts or the more profound stabs at moral inquiry of their more thematically darker works. Here, everything seems just a little too forced and self-consciously quirky for its own good, the shift from the first half’s zany tone to the more decidedly darker approach of the second is more jarring than anything else and the front loading of the majority of the big plot developments means that it becomes a bit of a repetitive slog in the final stretch. The film also gets bogged down with too many extraneous characters and subplots that come across more as distractions than anything else. Although the film may find some favor with viewers who have been waiting patiently for a new project from the Coens and who are willing to make do with a simulacrum in the meantime, my advice is to give Greedy People a pass and either wait for or revisit the real thing

.The Killer, meanwhile, finds John Woo remaking his own 1989 HK action classic of the same name, this time relocating the action to Paris and reworking the central role, an expert hired killer played by Chow Yun-Fat at his most implacably self-possessed, into a woman named Zee (Nathalie Emmanuel) who is so skilled at the deadly arts that she is practically considered a myth by the police and the underworld alike. Early on, her handler, Finn (Sam Worthington), sends her to kill off a bunch of bad guys in a club and while she accomplishes this—mostly with the aid if some cleverly hidden swords—she is chagrined to find that American singer Jenn (Diana Silvers) has been blinded in the crossfire. Although Finn orders her to go back to the hospital where Jenn is being treated and finish her off as well, Zee cannot bring herself to do it and winds up spiriting her away to a safe location for protection. This move makes her the target of both Finn’s goons and the police, led by maverick cop Sey (Omar Sy), and leads to any number of shootouts, chases and shifts in alliance, many of them accompanied by arrays of flying white doves that are much of a staple of Woo’s oeuvre as closeups of feet are to Quentin Tarantino.

Directors remaking their own films is not unheard of—it is a feat that has been done by the varied likes of Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments), Alfred Hitchcock (The Man Who Knew Too Much), Michael Mann (L.A. Takedown/Heat), Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep) and Michael Haneke (Funny Games). In those cases, there was at least some discernible reason as to why they would go back to their own projects—they had they chance to do things in a more expansive manner than before or they had a new angle through which to approach the familiar material. Bizarrely, Woo doesn’t really do either of those or much of anything else that might explain his desire to do this film. The screenplay by Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken has the bland feel of a once-interesting project that had all of the things that might have made it distinctive sanded away until it seems more like an unsuccessful pilot for a series in which Zee goes around helping people with their personal problems than anything else. (The fact that the film is being released via the Peacock streaming service only serves to accentuate that sensation.) The odd homoerotic underpinnings in the relationship that developed between the killer and the cop (Danny Lee) in the original have been transformed into occasional bits of bland flirtation (including a shared affinity for crossword puzzles) and an ending that goes so far out of its way to put a positive spin on such grim and brutal material that it becomes laughable.

Although the notion of making the central character a woman may sound somewhat provocative on the surface—as odd as it sounds, this marks the first time that Woo has told a story with a female character at its center—nothing is really done with the concept save for a few flashbacks explaining how Zee became a hired gun that a.) are unnecessary and b.) make it feel at times like a remake of Luc Besson’s Nikita, right down to having that film’s co-star, Tcheky Karyo, turn up in a supporting role. Woo can still pull off a decent action sequence from a technical perspective (with one extended hospital shootout coming across like an homage to his own 1992 epic Hard-Boiled) and feel more organic than the ones in his previous project, the soporific Silent Night (2023), they don’t have nearly the same impact because the characters are such ciphers that we don’t have much interest in what happens to them. Outside of some nice Paris locations (which help to accentuate the debt that both versions of the film owe to Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 neo-noir masterpiece Le Samourai) and a couple of reasonably effective bits of bloodshed, this version of The Killer never once makes a convincing case for its existence and while one could argue about whether it is indeed the worst of Woo’s English-language efforts to date, there is no doubt that it is ultimately the most pointless of the bunch

.Strange Darling, the new film from writer-director J.T. Mollner, is a film that offers viewers so many twists, turns and wildly unexpected developments that it becomes almost impossible to properly review—how can one discuss the pros and cons of a film when even the slightest description of what it its might smack of unforgivable plot spoilers? Suffice it to say (and those who want to go in completely unawares, which is probably the best way to approach it, should probably duck out now), the film opens with a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-style title crawl informing us that what we are about to see represents the last known moves of a prominent serial killer and will be presented in six chapters, throws us into the middle of a ferocious car chase in which a terrified and bloodied-up young woman (Willa Fitzgerald) in a Pinto is being pursued by a wild-eyed and shotgun-wielding guy (Kyle Gallner) in a pickup truck, and then reveals that what we are watching is actually Chapter 3. To say what happens from this point on would not be fair at all except to say that over the course of the remaining out-of-order chapters, we gradually begin to put the pieces together to allow us to understand what is happening between these two, albeit in a way that forces us to reconsider and reevaluate every bit of previously established information with the arrival of new details.

Movies that are constantly pulling the rug out from under the feet of viewer run the risk of getting really irritating really quickly—how can you be expected to invest any working interest in the characters or the situation if everything we currently know will be going tipsy-turvy in a few minutes? Although it finally starts to flag in terms of energy and innovation towards the end, Strange Darling keeps things interesting for most of its running time, thanks to some legitimately clever plot developments in Mollner’s screenplay and a slick visual style supplied by actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi. The film also benefits from strong performances from the two leads, both of whom are required to shift their tones repeatedly as things progress and who manages to pull them off with surprising deftness. (The admittedly small cast also includes Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hershey in brief supporting roles as well.) That said, while the film does indeed as a particularly wild and wooly take on the horror-thriller genre and the assumptions that we as viewers bring along in terms of how such things should develop, some viewers may find themselves put off by the way that it seems to flirt with somewhat regressive sexual/gender politics at times, though this ultimately proves to be just another example of its willingness to subvert expectations at every turn. For the most part, though, Strange Darling is an exhilarating and undeniably ambitious blast of pure cinema that establishes its twisted tone right from the start and maintains it until the end—just be sure to see it for yourself before someone else does and ruins its twists for you.