The Killer Inside Me
Drama. Starring Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson. Directed by Michael Winterbottom. (R. 109 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
Michael Winterbottom's "The Killer Inside Me" is a stylish piece of retro noir, a visually handsome rendering of the iconic pulp novel by Jim Thompson (last adapted in 1976). It looks spiffy. It has an attractive cast. Marcel Zyskind's cinematography seethes and shines. And it's a crock.
By "crock," I mean a movie in which the central female characters get battered by a sociopath and worship the ground he walks on. And no, there's nothing especially hip or empowering in the film's brand of sadomasochism. This isn't some stiletto-heeled, post-feminist dominatrix fantasy on display; it's just plain old unreconstituted no-means-yes misogyny. In the first of many bogus scenes, the lead character attacks a woman, pins her down and whips her at length with his belt. Being a gentleman, he apologizes. Her breathless response? "Don't say you're sorry!" Then she initiates sex.
It isn't even all that interesting. The sociopath in question, a West Texas lawman named Lou Ford (Casey Affleck), sporadically declares love for Loose Woman Joyce (Jessica Alba) or School Teacher Amy (Kate Hudson). He glides through the convoluted plot with nary a wrinkle in his suit or a dent in his Brylcreem, focusing his nasally disaffection on a corrupt builder (Ned Beatty), a wily labor official (Elias Koteas), a suspicious drifter (Brent Briscoe) and the out-of-town investigator (Simon Baker) who pokes his nose into Ford's affairs. From brief flashbacks, we gather he has been a cold-blooded deviant from an early age, but the Freudian underpinnings - such as they are - don't offer much in the way of drama. Nothing does.
Sex with the man is frequent, propulsive and fast. Only when Ford whacks somebody does he come anywhere close to expressing emotion, and it's hard to tell which one. Is it fury? Contempt? A touch of regret? A light smile plays at his lips while he bashes Joyce's face into stew beef (a long, appalling scene that reportedly scandalized some Sundance viewers), so maybe he's after the cheap intellectual thrill. But it's hard to say, because neither Affleck's cool performance nor Winterbottom's screenplay (written with Robert Weinbach) reveals any depth.
-- Advisory: Disturbing brutal violence, aberrant sexual content and some graphic nudity.
