Killer Joe is the sick and twisted movie based on the 1991 play. It's a comment on glorifying white trash, those same people we saw (and sometimes still see) populating daytime and reality television.They revel in their ignorance. They scream their dysfunction, and then the hostâ┚¬â€ÂJerry Springer, Maury Povich, and Montel Williams in the dayâ┚¬â€Âwould give a pat moral.
Killer Joe has no moral, except that sometime it's best to let the idiots kill each other.
Hirsch is up to his neck in drug debt. His dealers are going to murder him soon. Hirsch talks dad Haden Church and stepmom Gershon into killing Mom (a woman we barely see) so that they can claim the little sister Temple's insurance money. To this end, they hire psychopathic Dallas detective McConaugheyâ┚¬â€Âhe knows how to get away with it. Since they don't have the money up front, the family lets McConaughey take Temple's virginity. (She might be 16 and she's also a little mentally ill.)
They live in a dirty trailer of violence, filth, depraved sex and imbecility. It's going to get worseâ┚¬â€Âboy howdy!â┚¬â€Âand everyone is looking for a way to screw others over.
The performances are great, even if they sell the dark comedy more than the grittiness. Also, these actors are otherwise beautiful, so buying their trashiness is difficult. However, once the thing starts rolling downhill, it's impossible to look away from this bottom-feeder disaster.
Though I often get accused of liking overly complex movies, here is one proof that too many complications kill a film. When all is said and done, about half of these characters are completely unnecessary.
Quaid is an old-timey author who's written a story about a fictional author who lost a manuscript. Don't get attached, because Quaid is fictional, too. He's a character in a lost novel Bradley Cooper finds and publishes as his own. Jeremy Irons is an old writer who probably lost Cooper's plagiarized story about the author who wrote a story about an author who lost what he wrote.
That's what I mean by having too much junk. Obviously, this whole shebang links to Ernest Hemmingway's early work, misplaced by his wife in a briefcase on a train. If only this had been that interesting. What did Hemmingway and his wife say to each other right after? Where is that briefcase now?
Instead, we have beautiful women standing around but serving no deeper purpose. Other things nag; Bradley Cooper is supposed to be struggling, but his NYC loft is huge. Again, all the writer clichés come out to play.
Finally, I caught the poster on the way out. There's Cooper and Saldana making us think it's a love story. Why even pretend Quaid, who is wonderfulâ┚¬â€Âall the acting here isâ┚¬â€Âhas anything to do in this whole confusing mess in the first place?
Moonshining invincibility: the three Bondurant brothers of Franklin County, Va., were famous for their criminal distilleries during Prohibition. This violent trio also fostered a mountain legend that they could not be killed. The Wettest County in the World is the biographical bestseller by one of their grandsons. Lawless is the movie version.
Forrest (a wonderfully taciturn Hardy) turns out a hundred gallons of hooch each week for the mobsters in Chicago and other big cities. Brothers LaBeouf and Clarke assist him. One day, a stripper and probable prostitute (Chastain) shows up in Franklin County looking to lie low, taking a job in the Bondurant brothers' family restaurant. About the same time, Pierce arrives in town. He's a crooked special deputy, taking grift to let the moonshine pass over county lines, punishing those who don't play along to his dirty deeds.
What emerges is all-out mountain war. Long stretches of down-home hillbilly stoicism and silliness are washed over with wincing moments of violence. Through it all, the Bondurants work to maintain their legendary power.
The movie's pace is about as lackadaisical as a Southern drawl. The plot often smacks of more myth than fact. Actually, a little Paul Bunyan truth stretching might have livened up the otherwise dullish camera work. However, the acting is solid, the mood is decidedly gritty, and the characters are worthy of being added to the pantheon of American antiheroes.
