THE KILLER INSIDE ME 1 star
IFC Films, Rated R
While a director may profess to condemn rather than be consumed by the violence and torture his movie is immersed in on-screen, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, which, in a film like Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me, tends to distract by putting the director under nearly as much suspicion as his intended villain.
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A remake of the 1976 movie based on Jim Thompson’s pulp noir murder spree, The Killer Inside Me stars Casey Affleck as Lou Ford, a 1950s Texas small-town deputy sheriff with a dark side. In an ongoing cat-and-mouse tease with the audience as much as with unbelievably clueless local authorities—so much so you keep having an urge to get out of your seat and slap them around a bit till they get wise to the psycho—Ford insists from the start he’s a southern gentleman, pure and simple, who favors begging your pardon before homicidally kicking your butt.
Casey Affleck in The Killer Inside Me
When Ford is stuck with an assignment to head over to the house of newly arrived hooker Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba) and force her out of town, he ends up having hot sex with her, but not before beating her with his, well, bible belt, which really gets her in the mood—a practice he apparently picked up as a boy from Mom.
In between those S&M trysts with Lakeland involving belts as female neckties, Ford—who seems to be her only customer—is also getting it on with his bubbly future bride Amy (Kate Hudson). And when this bad guy with good manners needs an alibi in a hurry to elude the suspicious slow motion DA (Simon Baker), the repeatedly apologetic perp doesn’t think twice about dispatching either compliant honey to the afterlife as demented props in his highly creative crime scene scenarios.
As much The Kisser Inside Me as whatever else the title implies, the film endlessly alternates between scenes of raw sex and elaborate slaughter that’s inflicted more on the incomprehensibly forgiving female than male victims, which tends to eroticize the carnage in those too-much-information torture porn scenes, no matter what may have been on Winterbottom’s rather unfathomable mind.
Likewise not helping believability here is the poor choice of stupor-inducing Casey Affleck as the baby-faced bad guy, who seems to struggle as much with his character’s warped personality as his effort to negotiate his characteristic annoying perpetual whine with a blatantly poor imitation southern drawl. Never has serial killing seemed so lethargic and dull.
