Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Phillipe Lacôte
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Richard Madden, Babou Ceesay
Killer Heat, director Philippe Lacôte's adaptation of a short story by
the one-man Scandinavian bestseller factory Jo Nesbø, ancies
itself a cross between a classic 1940s noir and a '70s TV detective
show. It has the sort of femme fatale and wealthy villain you might
expect of the former, and an alcoholic, badly dressed private eye
straight out of the latter. But Killer Heat has none of the visual style of classic noir, and none of the
quirky characters that make the likes of Columbo and The Rockford Files endure to this day.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Nick, an alcoholic former New
York cop turned private eye who emigrated to Greece following the
breakup of his marriage. Sporting a suit borrowed from the protagonist
of '70s show Kolchak: The Night Stalker and a shaggy mane, Nick's aesthetic suggest he's a wise-cracking
counter-culture private eye in the mould of Elliott Gould's Philip
Marlowe in Altman's The Long Goodbye, but he's self-serious to the point of parody, cursed by flashbacks to
his discovery of his wife's (Abbey Lee) infidelity.
Nick is brought to the island of Crete following the seemingly
accidental death of Leo (Richard Madden), the son of a shipping
magnate (what else in Greece?) who ruled the island with an iron fist
before his death. Leo has an identical twin brother, Elias (also played
by Madden), whose trophy wife, Penelope (Shailene Woodley), has
hired Nick in the belief that Leo's death (he fell while free-climbing a
cliff face he knew like the back of his hand) was no accident. Teaming
up with suspicious local cop Georges (Babou Ceesay), Nick snoops
around and begins to suspect Elias of fratricide.
Nick might be the most inept detective since Frank Drebin, as it takes
him about three days to consider the one thing that will immediately
spring to the mind of every viewer within minutes of Killer Heat's opening. The "mystery" here is so thuddingly obvious that you'll
probably spend most of Killer Heat assuming the movie has some surprises up its sleeve, that like a
good magician it's using distraction in order to eventually shock us
when it pulls a rabbit out of its petasos. But no, it's exactly what you
expect. What makes it worse is how self-satisfied both the movie and its
detective protagonist seem when they finally spring this "revelation"
upon us.
Of course, a mystery can still be compelling even if you know exactly
where it's headed. To be honest, I would struggle to relate the plots of
most of my favourite films noir because what stands out from those
movies are less the narrative structure and more the performances, the
lighting, art design, snappy dialogue and memorable characters. Killer Heat has nothing to offer beyond the solving of its ages-three-and-up
puzzle. It has the televisual blandness we've mournfully come to expect
from movies made for streaming services. None of the performances are
bad per se, but the actors are denied anything substantial to chew on.
Aside from a bit of banter between Nick and Georges concerning place
names containing the definitive article ("The Gambia," "The Bronx"), the
dialogue is as memorable as the breakfast you ate on August 14th,
2013.
That bit of banter teases the movie Killer Heat might have been if Shane Black were at the helm. Gordon-Levitt
and Ceesay have the closest we get to any chemistry here but any buddy
movie potential is squandered by a leaden script that's far more
interested in its redundant mystery than its players. In an attempt to
evoke classic detective fiction, Nick's thoughts are presented via a
voiceover narration that assumes the viewer is busy folding laundry in
an adjacent room and can't actually see the pictures on screen. A
combination of allusions to Greek mythology and regrets over his
marriage, the voiceover does nothing to make Nick any more interesting
and is often eye-rolling in its disdain for the viewer's ability to
understand images without verbal explanation.
What's missing most of all from this dud is a little bit of sex. With a
title like Killer Heat you would expect Woodley's femme fatale to be binding Nick to a
bed-frame with his unfashionable tie as she weaves her cunning web, but
as Nick is staying in a literal monastery, that's out of the question.
If you like the idea of film noir but are turned off by the genre's
smart dialogue, expressionist lighting, quirky heroes and villains, and
its enduring sexiness, Killer Heat just might be the detective story you've been looking for.
Killer Heat is on Prime Video
from September 26th.
