In the already defunct era of video stores, I used to love browsing the used movies section. I rarely bought anything I hadn't previously rented, but when I did, I was almost always disappointed. There's a reason why nobody wants certain movies. Some are straight shitty, others are just mediocre ripoffs of successful, but worn-down themes. Serial killer movies for example, have been run into the ground, resuscitated and ran into the ground again. If redemption could come for serial killer movies, it would come from Asia, the land of high minded genre movies. KILLERS is a honest and rather stylish attempt to bring serial killers back, but it comes up quite short of its ambitions.
The movie narrates the parallel stories of Nomura (Kazuki Kitamura), a successful and psychopathic Japanese executive who loves to put his murders on the internet and Bayu (Oka Antara), a frustrated journalist living in Jakarta, Indonesia, who lost his marriage and his career after failing to get a mobbed-up politician convicted. Bayu first stumbles upon one of Nomura's videos online, but soon unwittingly releases his own after having to fight his way out of a deadly situation inside a taxi cab, after a story went south. They form a complicated psychological bond on the internet, while exploring their respective predatory urges and struggling with their inner demons.
Let's be honest here. The storyline was pretty fucking weak. Asian movies have this habit of turning boring tropes upon their head, blow them to pieces and stab you with the shards, but it doesn't happen in KILLERS. I kept waiting for that moment to happen, and I thought it did when Bayu, after his first voluntary kill, busted a nut and provoked a memorable a family scene when he found his wife's boyfriend playing with his daughter, but it never happens.
The film hints at breakout moments, but it remains a lukewarm boy scout, staying within the paradigm of existing ideas and the existing ideas about serial killer fiction are more tired than Homer Simpson running the 110m dash. In a nutshell, KILLERS is the story of a kind, but competitive soul lead astray into a spiral of destruction by frustration, failure, internet videos and an evil psychopath. The moral boundaries are always very clear, it doesn't really question anything.
The film hints at breakout moments, but it remains a lukewarm boy scout, staying within the paradigm of existing ideas and the existing ideas about serial killer fiction are more tired than Homer Simpson running the 110m dash. In a nutshell, KILLERS is the story of a kind, but competitive soul lead astray into a spiral of destruction by frustration, failure, internet videos and an evil psychopath. The moral boundaries are always very clear, it doesn't really question anything.
Vivid, shocking, sure. But we've been down that road before. Many times.
Now that my concerns about the narrative are out of the way, I'll admit that KILLERS was one beautiful movie. The serial killer themes seem like just one big excuse in order to film the goriest, most haunting scene possible and it does deliver both the gore and the thrills. There is one scene where one of Bayu's kills go wrong and he is being chased by an entire private militia down a hotel lobby. The scene is ridiculously long, vivid and gripping, and reminiscent of zombie movies. I loved the originality and the energy, but the entire scene (featuring a boring and generic kill) was engineered around that chase scene, so it felt like cheating a little bit. KILLERS felt like more of a visual sandbox than cohesive art.
KILLERS is a cautionary tale, a two hours long PSA against liveleak, as if written by a coked-out, cognitvely bankrupt 1980s Hollywood reject screenwriter. It packs a couple visual moments, but unlike most standout Asian films, it never swerves into that "holy shit" territory, it doesn't force you to redefine anything about yourself or about your knowledge of movies. Maybe it's an unfair standard to judge a movie by, but it angered the shit out of me to see a film so happy and fulfilled to draw inside the lines, and rehash some old ideas and clichés of a genre that straight out refuses to die. It doesn't seem to understand it's the farthest thing from original. Don't believe the hype, KILLERS is not the next cult movie coming from Asia.
KILLERS is a cautionary tale, a two hours long PSA against liveleak, as if written by a coked-out, cognitvely bankrupt 1980s Hollywood reject screenwriter. It packs a couple visual moments, but unlike most standout Asian films, it never swerves into that "holy shit" territory, it doesn't force you to redefine anything about yourself or about your knowledge of movies. Maybe it's an unfair standard to judge a movie by, but it angered the shit out of me to see a film so happy and fulfilled to draw inside the lines, and rehash some old ideas and clichés of a genre that straight out refuses to die. It doesn't seem to understand it's the farthest thing from original. Don't believe the hype, KILLERS is not the next cult movie coming from Asia.