John Dahl presents his most peculiar pic yet with ‘You Kill Me’, a genre hybrid that attempts to combine the gangster pic, an off-kilter romantic comedy and a drug rehab flick all into one. The cast is game but the film ultimately suffers from spreading itself too thin.
Dahl is no stranger in attempting to breathe new life into an old genre. He started off his career with a great run of film noir pics ‘Kill Me Again’, ‘Last Seduction’ and ‘Red Rock West’. Like ‘You Kill Me’, he likes to gain a lot of dark comedic moments from playing to the genres conventions. After the relatively straight-laced war pic ‘The Great Raid’, Dahl lets loose with his most absurd film yet.
The cast proves to hold most of the interest here with Ben Kingsley, Tea Leoni, Luke Wilson, Philip Baker Hall, Bill Pullman and Dennis Farina all embracing their roles with a mostly subdued relish. Taking a few pages from the revisionist gangster notebook that ‘The Sopranos’ started, we find Kingsley playing Frank Falenczyk, a Polish hit-man that can’t shovel the snow from his sidewalk without the convincing of a bottle that he throws in the snow a few feet in front of him each time he makes some progress. This guy’s got issues.
Part of a small-scale gangster Polish family in Buffalo, N.Y. in which his talents are taken advantage of by his uncle/boss Roman (Baker Hall), he finds himself in trouble when he quite literally falls asleep on a job - the job being the murder of their Irish rival O’Leary (Farina) who has partnered with the Chinese to become a particular threat.
Fed up with Frank’s alcoholism, Roman sends him to San Francisco (I’m never convinced why it had to be San Fran) to sober up with the ultimatum…or else! In San Fran, Frank meets up with a variety of peculiar characters including an oddball real estate agent (Bill Pullman, Dahl’s former drama coach) assigned to keep an eye on him and a gay toll-booth operator (Luke Wilson) who ends up being his AA sponsor.
Forced to get a job, the agent gets him a gig at a funeral parlor working with the sly mortician Doris (Alison Sealy-Smith) where he specializes in getting ‘em ready for the open-casket. An odd twist of fate leads sales exec Laurel (Tea Leoni) to the funeral home where Laurel and Frank hit it off so to speak. A couple that would even seem out of place in San Fran, Laurel is attracted to the oddly charming Frank, a man earnest and without pretense.
Unable to harbor a hidden agenda, Frank confesses all his secrets to Laurel who remains attracted to such an odd mix of vulnerable bluntness and matter-of-fact hardness. The attraction becomes all too clear in a funny montage where Frank instructs Laurel how to use a knife on a watermelon.
As O’Leary almost succeeds in wiping out the whole Pole family, Frank’s newfound love of his life and sobriety add a whole new wrinkle to his need to return home and make things right.
The cast and performances will carry the casual viewer through the film with everybody offering confident turns on the material. The problem is that the film doesn’t quite succeed in any one ambition. The offbeat humor is barely hit and miss (similar in tone to recent crimedy ‘The Ice Harvest’) with a few chuckles but little else. The romantic comedy works the best but I can’t help but think this all worked much better in the mind of a writer whose ideas are better than his writing talent.
The film is presented in a widescreen ration and is enhanced for widescreen televisions. Special Features include a Behind the Scenes, an audio commentary by Director John Dahl and the pic’s writers, a Before & After Visual Effects Comparison (ooh, the leaves were changed from green to blah…) and the films theatrical trailer.
A great cast holds the film together but I’m sure most of you will walk away scratching your heads. There are some fun moments here but the sardonic hitmen genre has been handled much better with ‘Grosse Point Blank’ and last year’s ‘The Matador’ so this pic comes recommended for fans of Dahl, Kingsley and a subdued quirky humor only.
You Kill Me is now available at Amazon . As of yet, there is not a release date for the UK. Visit the DVD database for more information.
Your Talkback on this Story