Killer Joe (2012)
Directed by William Friedkin
A cop who moonlights as a hit man agrees to kill the hated mother of a desperate drug dealer in exchange for a tumble with the young man's virginal sister.
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What critics say influenced Killer Joe
Juno Temple is stunning as this modernized, oversexed take on Tennessee William’s “Baby Doll,” with Dottie suggesting sexual curiousity, naivete and guile beneath her “slow” exterior.
It throbs with echoes everything from Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me to Elia Kazan's Baby Doll to Little Miss Marker, and trust me, you're going to want to take a scalding hot shower with a steel-wool loofa after its ecstatically nihilistic final sequence.
Adapted from Tracy Letts’ play by the playwright himself, Killer Joe is a dark comedy neo-noir that crosses the Coen brothers’ Fargo (keeping the half-baked money scheme but ditching frigid northern country for the deep-fried south) with Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (although abandoning Tennessee Williams’ underage lust-fantasy innuendo in favor of a more direct approach), and presents characters so stupid and morally repugnant that you start rooting for a stone-cold killer.
Dottie could have been Carroll Baker's sister in Baby Doll, the overheated Tennesse Williams/Elia Kazan collaboration.
Based on Tracy Letts’ play and directed by William Friedkin—the same team that produced the unhinged melodrama Bug five years ago—Killer Joe updates Double Indemnity for the trailer-park set, which means bypassing clever entendre in favor of straight-up venality and sleaze.
Before you can spot the noir inspirations (“Double Indemnity,” “The Killer Inside Me,” many more), things have gone very very bad for Chris and his clan (how the plan unravels is a true work of noir genius on Letts’ part, including a “duh” twist that I didn’t even see coming).
Yet Letts and director William Friedkin (“The Exorcist”), constructing a story that sometimes recalls “Double Indemnity” or just drunk Hitchcock, indulge the sleaze without much concern for the unconvincingly self-aware people or their relationships.
That's because "Killer Joe" is as degrading, disturbing and wholly jaw-dropping as "Blue Velvet" or "Videodrome," but, like those 1980s masterpieces, it's also expertly directed, even more brutally well-written and features a cast that acts the hell out of every scene.
Kin to Blue Velvet's Frank Booth, McConaughey's Joe is sociopathy incarnate in black-leather Tony Lamas, looking to profit, or kiss, or kill, or, preferably, all of the above.
It’s far more straightforward, but the only movie I can compare it to for immediate recognition is “Blue Velvet,” and I say that as praise.
The tone could be best described as the darkest of Coen brothers films, with some Blue Velvet oddity sprinkled in.
To do the deed, they contact Joe Cooper, a black-hatted and black-gloved Dallas police detective who suggests a cowboy movie villain as imagined by Jim Thompson; he might be kin to Lou Ford, the maniac Texas sheriff protagonist of Thompson's novel, "The Killer Inside Me."
The finale is bruisingly bloody, as rough a moment as any I’ve seen since Casey Affleck pummeled Jessica Alba in “The Killer Inside Me.” Friedkin doesn’t pull any punches, no pun intended, in a scene that is horrifyingly specific without ever losing its drama.
Thompson’s Pop.1280 and The Killer Inside Me center, like Letts’s play, on a lethally-inclined police officer.
First Chris and then Sharla get terrific beatings, Ansel learns he’s even a bigger fool than he or anyone else ever thought and Killer Joe (modeled somewhat after Jim Thompson’s protagonist in the unthinkably dark “The Killer Inside Me”) acts as if no matter what he does or whom he attacks no one on the Dallas police force will go after him.
It throbs with echoes everything from Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me to Elia Kazan's Baby Doll to Little Miss Marker, and trust me, you're going to want to take a scalding hot shower with a steel-wool loofa after its ecstatically nihilistic final sequence.
Upfront recalling the Jekyll/Hyde center of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (filmed by Michael Winterbottom in 2010), Joe also wears black from hat to boot.
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Killer Joe presents an inversion of The Night of the Hunter, in which the interloping father—for his cop/killer, McConaughey has certainly studied the psychopath suavity of Robert Mitchum's preacher/killer—is actually welcomed by a family that knows no rule except might makes right.
This isn’t to say that the prime years McConaughey squandered shirtless in dire romantic comedies put him on equal footing with the iconic star of The Night Of The Hunter and Out Of The Past.
In appearance he channels Jack Palance’s Wilson in George Stevens’ Shane, the sure-shot (and coffee-drinking, like Killer Joe) dark spirit called forth to take on the new, eponymous threat.
He started out making movies out of plays (“The Birthday Party” and “The Boys in the Band” were two of his earliest) and a good strong ensemble still delights him.
The film harks back to the low-budget chamber pieces of Friedkin's early career (The Birthday Party, The Boys in the Band), and he creates a perfect storm of montage and character interplay within a confined space, which culminates in a disturbing loss of humanity.
In 1973, director William Friedkin followed the pioneering gay drama “The Boys in the Band” and the Oscar-winning thriller “The French Connection” with arguably the most shocking film in Hollywood history: “The Exorcist.”
It feels as if it’s filtered through a lens that blends early 90s neo-noir features like Red Rock West with a gritty exploitation vibe from grind-house 70s films.
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Trailer park dad Ansel (Thomas Haden Church, " We Bought a Zoo") and slutty stepmom Sharla (Gina Gershon, "Showgirls") can't help, but his pill-popping, alcoholic mom has a 50K insurance policy set aside for his little sister Dottie (Juno Temple, "Kaboom," "The Dark Knight Rises") and he's heard about a corrupt cop who can take care of such things, a man called "Killer Joe."
Without losing any of Bug’s intensity, Killer Joe spins a lot of dumb hick behavior into a wellspring of comedy and plot twists, recalling Raising Arizona’s colorful vernacular while turning a simple contract job into a complicated web of family betrayals.