3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Killers Anonymous

2019, Martin Owen (Twist) -- Amazon

This was a fascinating film, as a viewing experience. I gave it a thumbs-down on the "recommend" button in Amazon. And yet, I didn't dislike the experience enough to turn it off. I trudged through to the end, what there was of it. Rotten Tomatoes has it at a literal zero for Critic Reviews (all nine of them disliked it) and 18% for audience reviews. Letterboxd is a smattering of 1 and 1.5 stars. The review on the Roger Ebert site says the movie, "...is a bit like a Magic Eye painting: the more you scrutinize it, the less coherent it is.". By all weights and measures, this is a terrible movie. 

And yet I persevered.

Ugh, don't hit me for that one.

It begins, a man running a support group in LA gets a call and immediately heads to the UK, where he meets Jade (Jessica Alba, Sin City) in a pub. Jade looks like the terrible depiction of a super model dressed as a biker. And she has a story for the man, a not very well told Tarantino-ian anecdote that is supposed to explain why she screwed up a job, a job to kill an American Senator. She finishes the story, gets picked up by a trashy looking bar girl, who subsequently kills Jade with her own gun. End cameo.

We then cut to the main setup of the movie, a meeting of a group colourful characters in the basement of a church -- the meeting for "Killer's Anonymous", a rag tag group of psychopathic or at least sociopathic murderers who find solace together, and learn tools to keep their urges at bay. As one would expect of killers, none like the other very much.

The man (Gary Oldman, Slow Horses), the LA support group man, sits in a lawn chair nearby watching them enter the church, or emerge on its roof for a smoke break. The voyeur seems to flip from an alley way to a nearby rooftop, depending on which angle the movie wants him to have a vantage point from. Up, down, weird angle -- he never seems to actually move but... 

A lot of stylistic schtuff happens in this act. We get back stories for the killers, done in a spotlight and flashback motif where each character tells about their first kill and why they do what they do. Its weird because this is definitely not the first meeting, so wouldn't they have covered this all in previous meetings? Also, there is a general sense of distrust between them, which is understandable, because they are all killers after all, but added to that is a new member. No one knows who she is or how she learned of the group, but she appears to be normal. And American. Also, there is someone hiding in the vents observing them. And finally, for this act, one of the killers is the trashy bar girl who killed Jade, and the topic of Jade's failed assassination of an American Senator keeps on coming up, as it has the city (London) in a stir. A lot of "ooo, this is a cool plot" things going on.

In the basement are: MyAnna Buring (Ripper Street), Michael Socha (Being Human), Tim McInnerny (Notting Hill), Tommy Flanagan (Sons of Anarchy), and a few others. Too many.

Owen really wants to be doing a Tarantino movie, but its no longer 1998, so I am not sure that excuse is valid anymore. The movie is scatter brained, all over the place, not in tone or style, but it what it seems to want the plot to be directing you towards. I am not convinced they knew where the plot was headed and envisioned the creator, not some Purple Suit to be blamed this time, jumping up every ten minutes of shooting with a new "Ohhh, you know what would be cool? Say this !" In the end, we just have a convoluted mess with no satisfactory conclusion to anything. There are some middling decent performances (Jessica Alba's cameo is not one of them) from familiar face character actors just being the character actor they are, and the stylistic choices are at least visually pleasing, but.... it hurt my brain to pay attention. Good thing I had my phone nearby.

I am thinking that being annoyed at a movie is what you want these days, like so much else in your life....