You ever noticed how almost all private detectives in books, movies, and TV are down and out? Rarely are they wealthy, successful, and famous. I suppose there is Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, but mostly private dicks tend to be struggling to stay above water, working in shabby offices, practically begging for clients.
Buy Kill Me AgainI don’t know why that is other than it’s more interesting narratively to have someone fighting to survive rather than one who is wholly successful. Or maybe it’s that private detectives involve gutter work – snapping pictures of cheats, looking for runaways, or finding murderers the police have no interest in solving. Whatever the reasons, I love a good detective story.
Jack Andrews (Val Kilmer) is as down and out as they come. The film introduces him as two wiseguys smash up his grubby little office looking for something of value to help pay back his gambling debts. They find nothing, but break his finger for good measure. They say they need $10,000 by next week, or they are going to get tough. There is clearly no way Jack is going to come up with that kind of money next week, next year, or in the next life. He’s not that kind of detective.
And then in walks a dame. It is always a dame in these kinds of stories. Beautiful, sexy, and ice cold. She says her name is Fay Forester (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer), and she wants Jack to kill her. Not really kill her, just make it look like she’s dead. She says she’s running away from an abusive ex, and the only way to truly get away from him is if he believes she’s dead. Jack agrees, but he’s not so sure if he believes her story.
We know she’s lying because the film opens with her and the boyfriend, Vince Miller (Michael Madsen), robbing some gangsters (and killing one of them in the process) of a suitcase full of cash. It was more money than they were expecting. Enough that the gangsters will miss it. Enough that will make them come looking for it. Vince thinks they need to get out of state and lay low, but Fay wants to go to Vegas and have some fun. When he says “no,” she hits him over the head with a rock and takes the money.
Jack tells her to rent a hotel room in Reno and be sure to flirt with the kid behind the desk so he’ll remember her. Then she goes to the casino and makes her presence known. Then he takes her back to the hotel; she waves at the clerk. Jack wears a cowboy hat low on his head, and faces away from the kid to make sure he can’t be identified. Inside the room, they pretend to make it rough. They mess up the bed, rip her dress, and then Jack takes out a bag full of human blood that matches her type (because he’s the type of guy who can get a bag full of human blood and match the type) and pours it all over the place. Then she sneaks out, and he drives her car with her bloody clothes in the trunk to the lake and drives it in. But not too far, for he needs the cops to find it.
It is the perfect crime. Except this is a film noir, and there is no such thing as the perfect crime. Fay “accidentally” left a pack of matches with Jack’s name and number in the hotel room. The cops naturally suspect him. The papers pick up the story, which puts Vince on his trail. And let’s not forget about the wiseguys he still owes money to. To put a cherry on that top, Fay never shows up to the rendezvous. In a word, Jack is screwed.
John Dahl, who cowrote the screenplay with David W. Warfield and directed the film, throws in plenty more twists and turns to keep you guessing. It actually isn’t that difficult to figure out where it’s going. This is a movie steeped in film noir, and it’s full of that genre’s tropes. Dahl’s next two films—Red Rock West, which I haven’t seen, and The Last Seduction, which is excellent—are very much in the neo-noir vein, but Kill Me Again feels like classic noir in all the right ways.
Val Kilmer is very good, as is Joanne Whalley-Kilmer. He gives Jack the right amount of world-weariness mixed with earnestness, and she’s a wonderful ice queen. Even when she’s scared and crying, afraid for her life, you can see the calculations going on behind her eyes. Weirdly, there isn’t a lot of heat between them despite this being a film noir made in the 1980s and them being married at the time. Madsen is always great in this kind of role. No one can tear up a room or put a lit cigarette out on a guy’s neck like he could.
You can tell this was Dahl’s first film; it all ends a little too neatly, and it isn’t nearly cynical enough, but this is a very fine time at the movies.
MGM Films presents Kill Me Again in the barest of barebones releases. I couldn’t find any details about the transfer, so I’m assuming it is an old one. There are no extras, and the cover art is atrocious. But if you just want a copy of the movie, and you should, then you can easily grab this anywhere Blu-rays are sold.
