Destroyer (2018)
Directed by Karyn Kusama
When Erin Bell was a young cop, she was given an undercover assignment that ended badly and destroyed her life. Years later, she must face her demons in order to make peace with her past.
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5 films that influenced Destroyer
What critics say influenced Destroyer
Kusama moves her star, and her camera, through these silky L.A. nightscapes in a style reminiscent of Michael Mann; between the visual aesthetics and the dazzling bank robberies and shoot-outs, Kusama basically remade Heat, but with Kidman in both roles.
The spectre and greatness of Michael Mann’s Heat hangs heavily over Karyn Kusama’s grandiose L.A. crime drama Destroyer.
There’s something familiar about Karyn Kusama‘s Destroyer, the sense that this film is unashamed of its genetic connection to classic cops-and-crooks films like Heat and The French Connection.
Think the Diane Venora/Natalie Portman portions of Heat, only without Michael Mann's acute attention to emotional shorthand.
If the worst case scenario is a female driven Heat, that would still be worth doing.
Unfortunately, this crime film plays like a mixture of Heat and Kill Bill that doesn’t earn its extended running time.
Movies like Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River or Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners have similarly attempted this sort of pulp tragedy.
That was the task in front of Destroyer director Karyn Kusama, who was riding high after her well-received thriller The Invitation.
On the other are her emphatic successes: her 2000 debut feature Girlfight, with Michelle Rodriguez, and 2015’s The Invitation, a shrewd, tightly-wound horror film that —for those of us watching her career over the last two decades — lived up to what we always knew she could do given the chance.
Destroyer, the latest from The Invitation director Karyn Kusama, is very much in the mold of antiestablishment ’70s cop movies like Serpico and Dirty Harry, but with a gender-swapped twist: Nicole Kidman stars as Erin Bell, an LAPD detective who’s still scarred by an undercover assignment that went tragically wrong nearly 20 years earlier.
The director’s follow-up to The Invitation spends much of its running time delving into the hallmarks of the gritty, nasty L.A. noir genre, bolstered by hard-boiled dialogue and Nicole Kidman ’s terrifying performance as a totally broken detective.
Kusama, who helmed the slow-burn wonder The Invitation, flips the script, taking the type of role usually reserved for male stars – the washed-up, hard-boiled cop – and giving it to a woman.
Movies like Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River or Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners have similarly attempted this sort of pulp tragedy.
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Destroyer doesn't break new ground, so much as it embraces the sweat-soaked and sun-burned pavement that has been walked numerous times by movies like Heat, L.A. Confidential and End of Watch (without being quite as good as those movies).