“Kill List” Movie Review – Canadian Premiere at TIFF

Sep 17 2011 – Today we saw the Canadian Premiere of Kill List. It was the only movie at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) Midnight Madness program that was not a world premiere (it has been playing in the UK since Sep 2nd and had its world premiere at SXSW in Austin almost 6 months ago on March 13). This year’s Midnight Madness featured 10 movies; we previewed the full Midnight Madness lineup here and reviewed 3 movies that had world premieres – You’re Next here , Livid here, and Smuggler here. The media site for TIFF offers the following synopsis of the film “Eight months after a disastrous job in Kiev left him physically and mentally scarred, ex-soldier-turned-contract-killer Jay is pressured by his partner Gal into taking a new assignment. As they track their prey, they descend into a disturbing world that is darker and more depraved than anything they experienced on the battlefield.”  

Since the movie was already released there are plenty of reviews already accessible, and a check of IMDb at the time of this review shows that 509 voters gave it a very respectable average score of 7.3. The movie itself begins by showing a strained relationship between Jay (Neil Maskell) and his wife Shel (MyAnna Buring). They argue about finances among other things and the arguing reaches an almost violent peak during a dinner date with the couple’s friend Gal (Michael Smiley) and his new love interest Fiona (Emma Fryer). It turns out Jay and Gal were army buddies and Gal has a proposal for a “job” that will pay handsomely. As expected the job involved killing some people – three hits to be precise. The two buddies take on the job and we witness Jay’s very psychotic nature emerge for the first couple of hits. The third hit is where the movie takes a bizarre twist and we are see the target at an occult ritual out in a field that reminds us of of the Bomehian Grove documentary.

I will clearly state that I did not enjoy the movie at all. The rating I see on IMDb as well as the generally positive reviews baffle me. I wont try to understand the difference of opinion and just leave it with: To each his own. The movie did not offer any explanation at the end and even worse didn’t even motivate me to try and speculate why things were happening. I never have a problem with movies that leave things unexplained but Kill List just left me rolling my eyes when it was done.  The movie itself wasn’t bad for the first half and featured some gut wrenching torture and execution scenes, but the slow character build up along with the nonsensical ending simply didn’t do it for me. The director Ben Wheatley was in attendance and introduced the movie as well as took audience questions after the movie (both videos below)

Verdict: This movie did nothing for me although alot of people seemed to enjoy it. A little more explanation of why things were happening would have made it much more enjoyable.