1 out of 5

Directed by: Kriv Stenders

Empty and uninteresting, ‘Kill Me Three Times’ feels like the result of Finished Idea that’s fleshed out with details only as needed.  Some writers / directors can get away with this approach, but it’s generally something to earn.  I don’t like Stephen King, for example, but he’s earned the skill, over so many years, to know in his head what the big points of his story are and then to fluff it out appropriately so it reads well to his fans.  I’m not saying his process is always that simple (or even that it is his process), just suggesting that formula execution seems more palatable when the executor has spent time practicing the formula.  Kill Me Three Times director Kriv Stenders and / or writer James McFarland knew they loved Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Trilogy piecemeal twists and turns and poppy aesthetic and knew they loved Tarantino’s casual cool violence and thus mushed the two together, with questionable filler like repetitive driving sequences and dated slow-motion.  Landing more certainly on McFarland’s shoulders is the modern take on noir characterization, which twists the snarky, unlikeable tuff into spin-offs of whiny, bitter people whom we can’t possibly like thanks to having no qualities beneath their defining characteristics – the wimp (Sullivan Stapleton), the fiery dame (Alice Braga), the witchy dame (Teresa Palmer), the greaseball (Bryan Brown), the brooder (Luke Hemsworth), and the angry dude (Callan Mulvey).  The actors do their best with the limited material, but only Simon Pegg, as a hitman, gets some wiggle room with his script.  …Though he still feels like a guest-star in a plot of cardboard cutouts.

The plot concerns a murder.  There’s no discernible reason for the “three times” structure except for the stylistic desires mentioned above, and thanks to supremely obvious telegraphing, you’ll have most of it figured out after a half hour, with the rest of the “twists” thereafter just giving you strain from rolling your eyes.  The cinematography is bright and cheeky and the sets are well chosen, but again, it just feels like dressing the emptiness, with Johnny Klimek’s energetic score slipping into too chintzy, whittling ‘Kill Me Three Times’ into something you’d expect to see on TV at 3am.  (You know, back when we watched TV.)