I’m a big fan of director John Dahl’s mid-’90s films The Last Seduction and Red Rock West. Both films are gritty tales of backstabbing, noir-ish twists, and strange interpersonal dynamics, all peppered with incredibly memorable characters. Dahl’s panache for quirky characters is striking, but with all the oddballs in his newest film, You Kill Me, one can’t help feeling that he’s just trying too hard to recreate some old magic.
This mildly amusing black comedy stars Sir Ben Kingsley as Frank, an alcoholic hit man working for his mafia family in Buffalo. But it’s hard to shoot straight when you’re blacked out every night, so for some inexplicable reason his uncle (Philip Baker Hall) ships him out to San Francisco to sober up. Then Bill Pullman (yay!), a real estate agent with connections to the mob, shows up to get Frank an apartment and monitor his progress. With the love of a sarcastic, morose woman (Téa Leoni) and the help of a recovering-alcoholic gay man (Luke Wilson), Frank hopes to regain his assassin mojo, so maybe one day he can kill again.
My head is spinning from that synopsis… all those character actors! All those quirky characters! The strength of You Kill Me should’ve been in the cast, but that ends up being the film’s fatal flaw. Kingsley comes off as a dumb automaton, Leoni seems twitchy and annoying, and Wilson is the same as usual: moon faced and puppy-ish. (Thank god for Bill Pullman.) You Kill Me tries to skate by on the merits of its cast, but what it really needs is a few of Dahl’s signature left-of-center characters, not a group of unlikeable freaks wallowing in their own eccentricities.