In 68 Kill, writer-director Trent Haaga’s adaptation of Bryan Smith’s novel, Chip (Gubler) is a going-nowhere type of dude living in a crappy trailer and almost literally shovelling shit for his job. But Chip doesn’t care because his girlfriend is Liza (McCord), an uninhibited young woman making her living as the side action for a wealthy idiot. Chip is bewitched by Liza and enjoys that she likes to treat him badly. When Liza ropes Chip into her scheme to steal $68,000 from her sugar daddy his life will quickly unravel into an escalating violent fantasy where his only route out is to grow a proverbial pair and stand up to Liza.
It’s a pulpy, deliberately OTT fiction that is clearly intended for achieving cult status. So many of the elements of 68 Kill go to make up innumerable cult films – femme fatales, a twisting narrative and a Grand Guignol-style amoral excess. Sadly, it’s dreary rubbish, stuffed full of cussing, brutality and blood but building to nothing remotely interesting. Very occasional good doesn’t distract from an avalanche of mostly bad.
McCord has won praise for her performance as the foul-mouthed, cheerfully callous Liza and it’s deserved, doing her best with a tedious cartoon character. There are so much excess and surface-sleaze that it all just becomes a quickly irrittating parade of juvenile attempts at being cool or edgy or whatever. One might say that’s the point but it doesn’t make it any more palatable to sit through.
There was an abundance of this sort of sub-Tarantino nonsense about in the ‘90s and it seems modern genre cinema’s fascination with grindhouse means we’re still getting films like this, a shrill, deadly dull, charm-free bore that confuses being sordid for being interesting. On a rare positive note, Haaga’s direction is fine, although the film still struggles with pacing but at least it’s not too long.
For those interested, as this is a recent film it’s understandably handsome in presentation. As for the disc, if you’re a fan of the film based on our screener you’re going to be disappointed – it’s just the film and nothing else. Despite this reviewer thoroughly disliking almost every element of this movie, some input from Haaga would certainly have been interesting at the very least.
We’ll offer a qualification despite the comments above and the score below. Should you be a fan of Haaga’s work as a writer or director, or if it sounds interesting to you, still give this a try. For every person that finds this a sour, mean-spirited chore (so, so us) there’ll be others who potentially discover a new favourite. We leave that up to you.
68 KILL / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: TRENT HAAGA / SCREENPLAY: MATTHEW GRAY GUBLER, ANNALYNNE MCORD, ALISHA BOE, SHEILA VAND / RELEASE DATE: TBC
