White trash dolts. Trailer park narcissists. Total loop jobs.
Welcome to Killer Joe, William Friedkin’s new NC-17 noir that’s as demented as a hyena on acid, yet strangely perceptive and chillingly funny.
What happens when an ignoramus (Thomas Haden Church) and his grandiose if equally ignorant son (Emile Hirsch), throw all morals out the window and decide to off their respective ex-wife and mom for the insurance jingle? Can you say crude to a welldone pulpy? Think something might go wrong after they hire creepy detective and moonlighting hitman Matthew McConaughey? You have no idea. Keep your eye on Gina Gershon, Church’s current wife, and let the sick action flow. Church’s daughter (and Hirsch’s sister) Juno Temple, enters the fray as human “retainer” for the deliberate and ultranasty McConaughey.
Friedkin keeps his tongue in his cheek no matter how depraved and outrageous things get (no small feat). You’ll laugh with him, not at him. You don’t direct The Exorcist and then subsequently forget how to do shockjng with just the right remove. Here the sum of the glaringly blunt individual parts impacts with something extra. Call it a giddy look at a substrata of America that is all too ripe for the picking. Or, if you must, a pessimistic commentary on the bane of evil that permeates our lives. You’ll have the time of your life if you can stomach it.
Based on Tracy Letts’s (Pulitzer-winning August Osage County) play, there’s a not unpleasant stagy quality to the proceedings. It’s as if Lars Von Trier woke up one day and decided to do Raymond Chandler and turn the violence hose up several notches. Friedman keeps things eerie and sinister without clobbering us. He refuses to paper over in the slightest the wrongheaded foibles of a family run amock. Yet his seriocomic sweep miraculously wrestles control where none seems possible. Ever ready to spin out of control, Killer Joe’s characters’ basest of instincts become unhinged as we watch incredulously. It veers into areas simultaneously foreign and familiar, providing now a knowing if jolting shudder, then a nervous and not unsavory laugh.
4 Loop Jobs (out of 5)