Killer Joe (2011) | Film Review

(Originally published on Letterboxd) - When it comes to William Friedkin, you never know what kind of film going experience you're going to get. The one common thread throughout all of his work, however, is a feeling of unease. You're not safe with Friedkin. He does not have your best interests at heart. He is a bold visionary that would rather shake you up than tell a thorough story. Sometimes that quality can make for exciting experiences, and sometimes it results in Kentucky fried duds. Killer Joe is one of the latter. 

Killer Joe is Matthew McConaughey, an ice cold Texas detective who moonlights as an ice cold hitman. When he's hired by Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch), a degenerate gambler and all around low-life, things get unexpectedly complicated when Joe meets Chris's sister, Dotty (Juno Temple). Dotty's childlike innocence combined with her girl next door looks is attractive to Joe, so much so that when he finds out that Chris doesn't have the money to pay him up front, he takes Dotty as a retainer. What follows is an uneven tale of regret, idiocy, murder, and cruel and unusual acts of indecency with fried poultry. 

While the performances in Killer Joe are good, the script (adapted from a play of the same name) never really seems to go anywhere. Much of it is set at the trailer of Chris and Dotty's father, Ansel (Thomas Hayden Church), and involves a lot of bickering that's pretty uninteresting. When there isn't bickering, there's perversion, which just sort of exists within itself without any sort of context. 

As I write this review, I'm still struggling to understand just what the point of it was, unless the point was that there isn't one, and I just spent an hour and a half or so watching dumb characters do dumb stuff for absolutely no reason. If that's the case, I could have gotten more out of an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. I'm thinking it has something to do with not trusting your family, or that you don't have to be a bad guy to be a bad guy. Hell, maybe it exists only to demonstrate how you're supposed to eat a chicken drumstick... who knows?

Killer Joe is worth seeing if you'd like to see McConaughey, Juno Temple, or Gina Gershon naked. I can't tell which is worse: teasing us with the threat of seeing McConaughey's drumstick, or teasing us with the idea that this could have been a good movie. Either way, now I'm hungry. Time to go grab a bucket of some K-Fried-C!