As I wait to hear back from the Australia Council for the Arts about my proposed year in residency “to think about stuff,” the mildly interesting Kill Me Three Times soothed the suspense of watching the mailbox.
The pulpy story unfolds in the beach town of “Eagle’s Nest,” actually Lancelin, on the Indian Ocean coast north of Perth. It’s a stage for murder, adultery and robbery, interspersed with helicopter shots of cars cruising the coastal road past gleaming sand beaches. This is a country meant for the wide screen.
A feature, not a bug, is photographer Geoffrey (Shine) Simpson’s violently lurid color: Simpson was Benoit Debie before there was Benoit Debie—apocalyptic red sunsets give way to ultraviolet corridors; a dentist’s office has the shiny fluorescent whiteness of a cheaply capped tooth. So what if Simon Pegg’s character—the Toronado-driving, Lemmy ‘stache-wearing, Angel of Death-esque private eye “Charlie Wolfe—is hard to take seriously, as he crisps his syllables in a manner that would make any Aus audience gnash its teeth?
In flashback and restart, Kill Me Three Times takes an unsparing look at the social problem of a hard-drinking hotelier (Callan Mulvey) whose meanness has spurred the straying of his wife (Alice Braga, looking uncommonly nice in that harsh sunshine). Also caught in the web of sin is a dentist (Sullivan Stapleton) who lost all his money on the ponies; the dentist’s wife (Teresa Palmer, not so good) who has a far from airtight plan to stage her own death in a car crash.
On the periphery are a poor but honest gas station owner (Luke Hemsworth) and Bruce, a leathery cop on the take, played by Aus movie star Bryan Brown. Brown, who once upon a time tantalized Barbara Stanwyck, has both the best slang—”Don’t come the raw fucking prawn!” i.e. “don’t play faux naive”—and the neatest exit scene. I was gradually hooked, but never quite convinced; the sad-clown waltzes on the soundtrack and the too-easy way Wolfe kills destines this to be an in-flight movie (on Qantas, anyway). It is what it is, but is it what it could be?
R; 90 minutes
