Kill List (2012)

The version of the film I saw had an introduction by Ben Wheatley. He said he had no problems in understanding the film. Well as the director and co-writer I expect him to know what was happening!Wheatley cut his teeth in television comedies such as Ideal. His film work has been a contrast, sometimes featuring nihilistic violence. Ironically his experience of movies landed him the Doctor Who gig as he directed Peter Capaldi's debut story.Kill List is a three act film, with each act being tonally different. It starts out as domestic drama of a dysfunctional family. Jay (Neil Maskell) is angry at his wife for blowing £40k in the last eight months. Now he needs to get back with his pal Gal (Michael Smiley) to restart their jobs as hitmen where they have been handed three jobs by a sinister man under a contract signed in blood. There was a strange scene at a dinner party where Gal's new girlfriend Fiona carves some kind of sign behind a mirror. The second act is more like a thriller. Hit number one is a priest, who smiles as he is shot dead. Hit number two is a librarian, his death is more violent. Jay and Gal uncover that the librarian is involved in child porn. Yet the victim reveals something to Jay, that he recognises him. Is it as an angel of mercy or a demon? Jay bashes his body with a hammer and the victim says thank you until he dies. The death gets more gruesome as they go after people involved in the child porn ring, Jay's behaviour shows him to be unhinged.The third act turns all The Wicker Man. Jay and Gal's third hit is a politician. They stumble on some weird human sacrifice by some kind of devil worshiping cult in the countryside. The politician is part of it, as is Fiona and so is the sinister man who gave them the kill list. The cult members chase after Jay and Gal, yet some of them again welcomed their deaths.The ending is ambiguous. Was Jay being primed to be some kind of antiChrist or is he just an unreliable narrator who has gone mad? What was the deal with the bizarre knife fight with the hunchback who turned out to be Jay's wife and kid.The script had input from the rest of the cast and I did think it got muddied and confused somewhere.

I really loved Ben Wheatley Sightseers, it rates as one of the best black comedies of all time. And I love the fact that so many people don't get the fact it's a black comedy. But Killl List is not a Black Comedy and I wish it was because sadly it doesn't work on any level. It starts off with two Tarrentino style hit men killing bad people on a list for money. This is done with extreme violence and with such ease it makes you wonder if the police force even exists. We then come to the final act which sees our two heroes stumble across some sort of Wickerman cult ceremony in the grounds of an MPs estate? Without giving to much away what follows is extremely violent bloody and very unpleasant and if I'm honest made no sense whatsoever. A real shame because what had lead to this point had been quite enjoyable. Maybe one day someone out there can explain to me what the film was about. My advice watch Sightseers.

Apart of the ending that left me with some questions I thought Kill List was an entertaining movie. I would have scored it slightly more if it was not for the ending. The ending is okay though, it's just that I like clear endings. What starts as a slow movie where you wonder how this will turn into horror or a thriller will end in a pool of violence. The plot is well written with a good amount of violence. Once the hit-man played by Neil Maskell starts his killing spree there is no stop to it. It's quite violent and graphic and that makes the movie even better. The more moderate hit-man played by Michael Smiley tries to control the anger of the other hit-man but it's a lost battle. What follows is a good violent story with enough twists to keep you interested.

*** Contains spoilers *** If Tarantino was possessed by Ken Loach on the set of a movie, the result would probably not be too dissimilar to Kill List. Here we have two normal guys edging into mid-life, struggling with the details of the day-to-day; relationship problems, work-related stress, the difficulty of maintaining friendships and the burden of broken Jacuzzis. Only they're professional killers.Realism is the cornerstone of this film. The tension we feel at the dinner party scene is of a type many of us will have experienced for real. The love Jay shows his son and the loneliness Gal feels as a singleton resonate with us. The brutality of the violence, when it arrives, is so powerful that it's almost impossible to watch. The hammer scene ranks alongside the attack on Officer Murphy at the start of Robocop in terms of unwatchability. As our protagonists start to realise they are losing touch with what counts as normal, so we, the viewers, feel the well-designed Ikea fixings of our carefully constructed world being slowly unscrewed. There is no noir stylising here and no escape from the simple fact that the real world can be just as bleak as any torture-porn horror film.What makes this film so good is how it normalises Jay and Gal's lifestyle choice. We live in an era where people are allowed to choose whatever they want to be, and where moral judgement of personal decisions is near-unacceptable. Self-definition is the ultimate human right. Kill List is a masterful subversion this neoliberal idealisation of human behaviour. At no point does the film question the validity of their careers. Jay's wife encourages him to go back to work to earn money just as if he was an out-of-work builder. There is no moral price to be paid for their killings, there is no sense that the two protagonists are getting their comeuppance. Jay and Gal are violent, yes, but they are not archetypal bad guys - their endings are not a judgement made upon them by fate, karma or God. On a personal level, Jay's loss of control happens not because he is poisoned by his work, but because he is liberated by it and is allowed to act out his true nature. "I don't know where it comes from." Jay tells Gal, and that is the limit of his introspection. He is not a tortured man and he is not corrupted by evil or nihilism. He just "is".Jay is a caricature of modern man. He does not question himself and acts only to satisfy his basic needs and the basic needs of his family. His morality is that of the Tabloid vigilante, being purely unthinking and instinctive and motivated by an overwhelming desire to punish those who have broken his self-defined moral code. He's the personification of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, free from any external restriction and free from the shackles of the State and of Religion. He is Howard Roark's evil twin, doing nothing more than what comes naturally to him and what he is best at.Only this kind of freedom isn't real freedom at all. As one of the characters explains, Jay is just a cog. His freedom counts for nothing - in fact, his freedom traps him on his inevitable path. Guided only by his instinctive sense of self, he is blind to, and powerless against, the manipulation of society's overlords, a millionaire Tory MP and his black magic cadre. At the film's denouement he is left utterly mindless, unable to think or feel anything, bewitched and pacified by the congratulatory applause of his social betters. So much for freedom.Several critics have said they can't quite put their finger on why the film is so disturbing. I believe the film is disturbing because it shows us just how powerless we really are. Horror has been described as the purest form of film storytelling, this is a perfect example.