A potent cocktail of mayhem, sex and betrayal, Killer Joe marks a glorious return for director William Friedkin. This ruthless and thoroughly enjoyable thriller marks the second collaboration between Friedkin and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Tracy Letts, following the 2006 film adaptation of Bug.
Chris (Emile Hirsch) is broke, desperate and not very bright — a classic dangerous combination. He barges into his father’s trailer with the only plan he can think of: murder. If they kill his mother, they can collect enough insurance money to settle his drug-dealing debts and escape their squalid little life. He even has a man to do the job: a cold, cowboy-styled Dallas detective named Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), who moonlights as an assassin.
But Chris and his father (Thomas Haden Church) can’t come up with the deposit Joe needs to do the deed, so Joe demands a retainer: Chris’ teenaged sister Dottie. Played to perfection by Juno Temple, Dottie is both virginal and vengeful. She eventually accepts her role as Joe’s bounty, but not without exacting her own price. As the plot lunges into more and more brutal territory, her bizarre relationship with the killer takes on a sweet but curdled tang.
Faithfully adapted from Letts’ 1993 debut play, Killer Joe is soaked with lurid, disturbing potential; some scenes go well beyond the bounds of good taste. But that is also its pleasure. In the hands of a master like Friedkin, McConaughey calibrates his performance exactly between seduction and menace. Hirsh, Temple and Church also rise to the challenge of Friedkin’s pulpy, film-noir fun, but it’s Gina Gershon, playing Chris’ volatile stepmom Sharla, who emerges as the heart of this film.
The French Connection and The Exorcist alone are enough to secure Friedkin’s reputation. But he has built a career beyond those seventies classics, probing time and again into the greed and desperation that fuel violence. It should come as no surprise that one of his finest works, Sorcerer, is a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear. Like that film, Killer Joe is remorseless, right up to its radical final scene. –TIFF
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22 year-old Chris Smith is a drug dealer down on his luck, but things are about to go from bad to worse when he hires the charming hit man, Killer Joe, to murder his own mother (who everyone hates) for her $50,000 life insurance policy. With barely a dollar to his name, Chris agrees to offer up his younger sister, Dottie, as sexual collateral in exchange for Joe’s services until he receives the insurance money. Will there be a time when everyone pays the price? Does every life have a price? “Killer Joe is a Cinderella story, but the prince happens to be a hired killer. He’s also a sheriff in the Dallas Police Department,” says William Friedkin, who is better known for his legendary The Exorcist. (Filmekimi)
22 yaşındaki Chris Smith, bahtsız bir torbacıdır. O kadar bahtsız o kadar çaresizdir ki, hayat sigortasından para alabilmek üzere herkesin nefret ettiği öz annesini öldürtmek için Katil Joe’yu tutar. Olağanüstü karizmatik Joe, beş parasız Chris’in teklifini tek bir şartla kabul eder: Sigortadan para gelene dek Chris’in kız kardeşi Dottie’yi cinsel arzularını gidermek için kullanacaktır. Bu durumda herkes bir bedel ödeyecek midir? İnsan hayatının bedeli nedir? Efsane film The Exorcist / Şeytan’ın yönetmeni William Friedkin, Katil Joe için “prensin aynı zamanda hem kiralık katil hem de Dallas’ta şerif olduğu bir Külkedisi masalı” diyor.
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