- The Guardian,
- Friday April 18 2008
The title carries a strong suggestion of a return to director John Dahl's golden noir period, in which his debut, the similarly titled Kill Me Again, led to the splendours of Red Rock West and The Last Seduction. Ah, well, keep hoping, but at least this quirky, uneven black comedy is better than his sci-fi foray, Unforgettable.
Ben Kingsley's given us a shockingly scary gangster in Sexy Beast. Here, he's a rather ineffectual alcoholic hitman, sent by his bosses in Buffalo to take a 12-step programme in San Francisco, where he takes a job as a mortuary attendant and starts a tentative affair with Téa Leoni. This melange of murder, funerals and real life naturally trails echoes of recent HBO titans The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, though the set-up is more like Grosse Pointe Blank.
On all counts, the comparisons rebound against Dahl's film. The brittle dialogue is its best point - it's by Chronicles of Narnia duo Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, but it constantly follows a funny scene with an uncertain one, and the casting just seems odd: Kingsley has many strengths, but comic and eccentric just aren't his thing. It's asking a lot for us to root for his character to overcome his alcoholism as he's just going to return to professionally creating corpses rather than cremating them, and it's hard to see what Leoni's character sees in this gloomy, bald, maladroit, strangely accented old bloke whose only skill is population-reduction.
