The Polish 12-Step.

Well, in its favor, John Dahl’s You Kill Me, which I caught Friday night down at the Angelika, has its heart in the wrong place. This tale of an alcoholic hitman trying to find the wagon works really hard to be a wicked and misanthropic black comedy akin to other, better noirs in Dahl’s oeuvre, such as The Last Seduction and Red Rock West. But, while I found myself intermittently amused by the film, the strain shows. In sum, You Kill Me is too self-consciously quirky by half, the jokes are mostly all-setup and little-payoff, and unfortunately Dahl is mining material here that’s already been done better elsewhere, from Sopranos to Fight Club to Six Feet Under to Miller’s Crossing. The result, while not a terrible night at the movies by any means, is probably at best a rental. Or, since it’s an IFC Films production, wait for its no-doubt continual rotation on the IFC Channel…in short, it won’t kill you to hang back on this one.

When we first encounter Polish-American assassin Frank Falencyzk (Ben Kingsley with an inscrutable accent), it’s a snowy winter morning in dreary Buffalo, and Frank is interrupting his daily downing of Smirnoff with occasional, half-hearted stabs at shoveling his steps. But, as we soon discover, half-hearted stabs pretty much sums up Frank’s life these days: his passionate love affair with the bottle has encroached considerably on his predatory livelihood, as evidenced by his sleeping through a crucial hit on local Irish mob boss Edward O’Leary (Dennis Farina). So, after an angry intervention by his gangland employer (Phillip Baker-Hall) and best friend (Marcus Thomas), Frank is shipped off to San Francisco with orders to clean up his act, namely by getting himself into AA and holding down a new job as an undertaker’s assistant. This Frank attempts to do, mainly because he’s being watched by a gun-toting local wiseguy (Bill Pullman) with a passion for the real estate market. But soon Frank has found a new sponsor (Luke Wilson) and a new potential ladyfriend (Tea Leoni), and starts seriously thinking about a life after vodka. Of course, just at this moment, his flailing friends in the Buffalo mafia find they need him back in the worst way…

There’s grist for some pretty dark, funny goings-on in this set-up, and one of the better running jokes is that Frank’s trying to throw off the demon rum — and his friends are helping him — mainly just so he can kill people more efficiently. But, while You Kill Me aims to aim low, it’s already been beaten to the punch by a lot of other solid and memorable films and TV shows. Even notwithstanding Frank’s Tony Soprano-ish vulnerabilities, his adventures in AA were already mostly anticipated by the bleak humor of the first act of Fight Club, and his backroom shenanigans in the mortuary business can’t help but recall similar moments in Six Feet Under. (The Polish v. Irish clan war in Buffalo, meanwhile, mostly recalls Tom Reagan’s negotiating the Irish-Italian divide in Miller’s Crossing.) Some sort of overlap is to be expected, of course — the mob movie isn’t exactly what you’d call a virgin genre at this point — but in each case here, unfortunately, Dahl’s film comes up on the short side.

What’s more, too many of the jokes in You Kill Me are telegraphed long before they reach fruition (c.f. the disgruntled guy at the toll booth), and too many of the plot devices just defy credulity: Tea Leoni’s character, for example, is given a problem with “boundary issues,” mainly because the romance here wouldn’t hang together any other way. Similarly, most of the reveals conveniently take place in the midst of AA meetings in ways that feel entirely too Hollywood to be taken seriously. All this being said, I never quite turned on You Kill Me like I probably should have — Despite its many faults, I did spend most of the film with a smile on my face (This may partly be because Bill Pullman is kicking around back there. He’s pretty over-the-top here — and hard to call a good actor in any case — but he is one of those hard-working character guys I enjoy seeing around. And, if nothing else, he pushes back against the Wilson factor…although, to his credit, Luke here is much less intrusive than his brother Owen tends to be of late.)

The Thick Red Line.

Only six years after The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick readies his fourth film, Che, tentatively with Benicio Del Toro in the title role. (Expect voiceovers.) I just watched TTRL again the other night and was amazed once again how many people are in it. I remembered Jim Caviezel, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, John Travolta, George Clooney, John C. Reilly, Ben Chaplin, Nick Nolte, Adrien Brody, Sean Penn, and Elias Koteas from the first go-round in the theater. But seeing it again this week, I now also noticed Tim Blake Nelson, Nick Stahl, Jared Leto, Matt Doran (Mouse from The Matrix), and Thomas Jane — plus Miranda Otto as Chaplin’s wayward wife on the homefront. I’d love to see the unreleased six-hour version someday (which, according to the credits, apparently also includes Viggo Mortensen, Mickey Rourke, Lukas Haas, Billy Bob Thornton, Bill Pullman, Jason Patric, Martin Sheen, Donal Logue, Randall Duk Kim [The Keymaker from Reloaded], and a full-on performance by Brody), even if it ends up being too much for one sitting.

Blockbuster Friday.

So this Friday, I finally caught up with a number of films I’ve been meaning to see, among them:

The Ring (US): A very scary premise, and after the teenage sleepover setpiece I thought this might be one for the ages. But, although the ending somewhat redeems it, this film feels like a missed opportunity. I haven’t yet seen Ringu, so I don’t know how it measures up, but turning the bulk of the film into a Nancy Drew mystery was a straight-up horrible call. After a truly frightening intro, the movie then spends most of its running time lining up all the images on the tape with the ghost story at hand, with all-too-frequent flashbacks in case you’re a short-term amnesiac or something. What everybody involved seems to have missed is that the movie would’ve been much scarier, at least to my mind, if some portions of the tape had just been left unexplained. Instead, the powers-that-be left unexplained key plot elements in the story, such as how little boy Watts sees dead people. I think in another director’s hands – a director unafraid to take risks and one who has a little more faith in her audience to put two and two together – this could’ve been very, very scary. (Although it’s not as bad a swing-and-a-miss as the US version of the The Vanishing.) So, with that in mind, I’m looking forward to seeing Ringu.

Igby Goes Down: I’m really not a big fan of the “unrealistically erudite young NY sophisticate” genre – I liked Rushmore a lot less than most people I know and I find Whit Stillman films to be absolutely insufferable. So when Igby suggests his brother’s a pedantic bore for liking Rilke and later wryly namedrops “The Island of Lost Toys,” I visibly shuddered. But, all in all, Kieran Culkin is rather appealing in the title role, and – with solid support from Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum, Amanda Peet, Bill Pullman, and Jared Harris – this one turned out to be more enjoyable than I had earlier feared. Claire Danes seems miscast, and I just don’t get what it is about the one-note “clipped and distant” monotone of Ryan Phillipe’s delivery in every film that anyone finds appealing (he’s got less range than Keanu), but, in the end, this one made for a decent rental.

Far From Heaven: I’m hit-and-miss with Todd Haynes films – I thought Safe was splendid and bizarre, but didn’t vibe into the puzzling Velvet Goldmine at all (I am looking forward to his Dylan biopic project.) And, to be honest, this one suffered a bit from being the middle child in my Friday triple feature – I found my attention flagging quite a bit in the early going. Which is a shame, because in the end this turned out to be quite a good film, if a little on the slow side. I thought the retro look and feel started out rather gimmicky (for example, in the lime green police station where Julianne Moore picks up her husband), but settled down as the story took over. And I think I probably would have liked it more if (a) I hadn’t just sat through Igby and (b) if I were more well-versed in the films of Douglas Sirk. But, worth seeing, and Dennis Quaid and Patricia Clarkson were particularly good.

The Core: Without a doubt a poor, poor film, and yet I enjoyed myself much more than at the drab and slow-moving Dreamcatcher. It helped that this film is stocked with actors I generally root for – Aaron Eckhart, Bruce Greenwood, Delroy Lindo, and Stanley Tucci. (As for Hilary Swank…well, I haven’t yet seen Boys Don’t Cry, but I gotta believe she’s much better in that than she was in this, although Halle Berry won recently too and – frankly – she’s rarely any good either.) To be sure, the special effects are well on this side of lame – for example, when the crew get stopped somewhere in the center of the Earth and find themselves inexplicably on the Star Trek: TNG Away Team set…I half-expected Morlocks or Cave Trolls or something to show up. And the story makes very limited sense (as a friend of mine pointed out, how does gravity work on this ship? Everybody’s standing around normally while this bird is digging straight down.) But, as a popcorn film, The Core was reasonably entertaining for two hours, even though I really can’t recommend it.

Next up, I’d like to catch The Good Thief and Ghosts of the Abyss before the fanboy films start flying fast and furious on May 2, with the so-far-well-received X2.