Kill ’Em All (2017)
(In French, On TV, September 2020) There is something halfway interesting in Kill’em All’s structure: As a nurse is interrogated by the FBI regarding a mass shootout at her hospital, we see, in flashback, the way the day unfolded. As a way to add interest to a bog-standard revenge story starring Jean-Claude van Damme, it’s not a bad idea. Alas, this promising opening quickly gets bogged down in other more serious issues. The lack of directorial prowess from Pjetër Malota is regrettable, but really unexpected from the film’s low-budget pedigree: as long as people are getting beaten up or shot, it’s not the staging or the cinematography that’s going to wow us. What’s far more damaging is that, as Kill ’em All advances, it feels to grow more serious than it should be. There’s a time for sombre reflections on the cycle of violence to emerge from the Balkan states’ wars, but there’s also tonal consistency issues—and while Kill ’em All tries to be a pulse-pounding action movie, it also stomps on the brakes as it moodily explains its revenge-fuelled backstory in a way that’s really no fun at all. But it gets worse, and you can actually sense it coming—By spending so much time on the nurse protagonist, the film clearly telegraphs that there’s more to her than meets the eye, and much of the film’s last twenty minutes are spent preparing, announcing, making, then reinforcing a perfectly obvious plot point that is clearly supposed to be a twist. It really doesn’t work—in fact, it makes the film much worse considering how much of its last minutes are spent going over perfectly obvious material. (Suzzzaaaaane with a Zed!) Once all is done, we’re not left happy, and the film’s lesser flaws are magnified. There’s bad casting, for instance: While it’s cool to see Maria Conchita Alonso again and Autumn Reeser is very cute in hospital scrubs and brunette bangs, Peter Stormare is all wrong in greasy hair and thick beard as a back-office CIA analyst. Worse yet is Jean-Claude van Damme, about twenty years too old to even fit in the chronology of his character—a casting mistake made even worse by the way his character reacts like an old man rather than what a younger character should have been able to accomplish. Those may have been forgivable with a stronger, more sustained script—but the multiple points of failure in Kill ’em All multiply to make the film feel even worse than it is.
