Kill Me Three Times – 3 out of 5
My first exposure to Simon Pegg was in the first of the
Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy; Shaun of the Dead. Since then, I’ve really enjoyed the guy and
have pretty much made it my business to watch anything he is in. In 2014, Kill Me Three Times came out
starring Pegg but, despite having him in it, I never went out of my way to
check it out. Finally, during this last
weekend, I decided I would finally get around to watching it. To be honest, I probably could have kept
waiting.
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| Can we all agree that Simon Pegg is a treasure to the world? |
In Australia, a contract killer by the name of Charlie Wolfe
(Pegg) is hired by a wealthy businessman (Callan Mulvey) to investigate his
wife Alice (Alice Braga) because he believes she’s cheating on him with a local
man named Dylan (Luke Hemsworth).
What is supposed to be a simple job turns out way more complicated as he
discovers that Alice accidentally got entangled in a scheme from a dentist
(Sullivan Stapleton) and his wife (Teresa Palmer) as they are attempting to
use her for insurance fraud by killing her and making the authorities think
it’s the wife. Things are even more
complicated as a corrupt cop (Bryan Brown) stumbles on the dentist’s plan and
wants in on the action in order to keep his mouth shut. Now Wolfe is stuck in the middle of a
gigantic mess that was originally supposed to be a simple investigation turned
contract killing.
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| The wildlife in Australia is dangerous but it turns out the people want to kill you too. |
Kill Me Three Times is a fun idea that has a lot of
potential for dark comedy fun. Hell, the
film even presents itself with a nice slick presentation that doesn’t unfold
its plot in a linear/A-to-B-to-C fashion but rather reveals itself in a way
where the twists in the madness that Wolfe has unknowingly found himself
drowning in is done so in a clever way.
However, the film stops short by a significant distance of being
something memorable or as entertaining as it should be.
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| Stopping short...sorta like stopping short of getting a car to sink when you are trying to kill someone for insurance fraud purposes. Yep, that was a stretch but I wanted to justify this screencap. |
The performances in KMTT are decent and there’s no denying
that Pegg is enjoyable but the story just proved to be not that engaging. I did state that the story is first opened in
a non-linear fashion but once all the major character reveals are done and the
plot starts to chug along, the film sorta hits a leisurely stride that isn’t
conducive to engaging storytelling. The
film is far from boring but once you know which direction the story is going,
it quickly just becomes a serviceable affair that is mildly entertaining and
only made decent by the cast.
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| Luke Hemsworth is considered the least attractive Hemsworth...and that dude is ruggedly handsome. That family is just blessed with good genes. |
I found Kill Me Three Times to be sorta fun and kinda
entertaining but pretty much to a small degree in the moment that I was
watching it. Yes, the cast is decent and
I thought Simon Pegg was fun as Charlie Wolfe.
Hell, there’s even some decent laughs in this dark comedy but the story
just didn’t deliver anything that engaging or even memorable. Finally, there are just not a lot of moments
that stand out where any of the characters beyond Wolfe are that
interesting. This is just another one of
those movies that had a decent, marketable idea but it just didn’t live up to
it.
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