You Kill Me Review
By David Kempler
Drunken hit man nails the target but no bullseye here.
Dark comedy warms my heart. It's such a difficult line to walk. There is always a danger of falling into a murky cross-section of genres where the audience doesn't know whether to laugh, cry, yawn or look around at their fellow movie-goers in the hope of seeing how they are reacting and then understanding how to react themselves.
Director John Dahl ("The Last Seduction") does a pretty fair job of knowing when to tighten the reins and when to let them slack a bit. The writing team of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely ("The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe") have constructed a tale of a Polish hit man in Buffalo, Frank Falenczyk, (Ben Kingsley) who has a drinking problem that is interfering with the skills he needs in his profession.
Frank misses an important hit when he gets drunk and falls asleep, allowing Edward O'Leary (Dennis Farina), the head of the Irish crime syndicate to escape a trap. This does not sit well with Frank's boss Roman Krzeminski (Philip Baker Hall) who sends Frank off to AA rehab in San Francisco. In San Francisco Frank meets a real estate salesman named Dave (Bill Pullman) who is watching Frank to ensure that he stays sober. Dave gets Frank an apartment and a job making dead people presentable for their funerals. At work, Frank meets Laurel Pearson (Tea Leoni) whose stepfather has just passed. Soon, offbeat romance blooms.
Kingsley is great (I know that is redundant) but lacks the ferocity he displayed in "Sexy Beast" where he demonstrated that his acting range is second to no one. In his defense, the role doesn't call for ferocity here. It calls for workmanlike professionalism and Kingsley hits his usual home run. Leoni also does a fine job as a quirky woman who is unfazed by anything that gets thrown at her. While he doesn't have much on screen time, Pullman steals every scene he is in, in perhaps his finest performance to date.
"You Kill Me" is a good film that feels like it should be a little better. It never gets funny enough to be great black comedy and there is no real tension in the scenes that appear to have been devised to cause tension in the audience. The result is a light version but I'm not certain of what. It's still definitely worth seeing but perhaps a more accurate title would have been "You Give Me a Paper Cut".
