KILL ME THREE TIMES (2015)
GENRE: Action, Thriller, Comedy
DIRECTOR: Kriv Stenders
WRITER: James McFarland
STARS: Simon Pegg, Teresa Palmer, Alice Braga
COUNTRY: USA/Australia
PLOT: Professional hit-man Charlie Wolfe finds himself in three tales of murder, blackmail and revenge after a botched contract assignment.
Set in a small Australian surf town, Kill Me Three times is a bit of an odd film. On the face of it an enjoyable yarn about a bumbling dentist and his scheming girlfriend who hatch a plan to kill a local girl for the insurance money. But things get complicated when the girl’s husband also wants her dead and hires Simon Pegg to do the deed. Throw in a crooked cop and an adulterous lover and things get suitably messy. All sounds quite fun.All of the actors are good enough (if a little stereotypical Aussie-Com), Simon Pegg is Simon Pegg and the humour is suitably black. However it all starts to fall apart because of it’s ‘three times’ theme.
The film is split into three scenes (Kill me once, Kill me twice etc). Having watched the first scenes you find that the second (Kill me Twice) is actually what happens before scene one. This is a technique I quite like in film-making as you learn about why certain actions took place and what else was going on at the time. So everything is going fine.
But then I find that scene 3 is back to the normal timeline. This just makes the whole film seem a bit unsure of what it’s gimmick is. I’d have loved it to have followed the backwards timeframe, but having the three segments played out of order in this way (with the first scene sequentially covering part 2, then follows part 1 and part 3 – but all still numbered 1, 2, 3) feels haphazard and unnecessary.
MOVIE REVIEW
Summary
A functional black comedy that sets you up for a gimmick that ultimately doesn’t appear.
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