Posted: 09/16/2001

Kill Me Later

(2001)

by Hank Yuloff

It was a very uncomfortable feeling Friday night as we left the theater following Kill Me Later. This was the “Premiere” showing, having been postponed from earlier in the week, and the director (Dana Lustig), and writer (Annette Goliti Gutierrez) and about 25 of their friends were all there. I wanted to say something nice, but I couldn’t think of what would be appropriate. I’ve seen plenty of worse films, but having to face the person who has spent several years on the script and story and tell them it just didn’t do it for me seemed like a not so nice thing to do. Especially after Gutierrez pointed out before the screening that Kill Me Later had been slammed by LA Weekly.

The premise is a good one. Shawn, played by Selma Blair (Legally Blonde) is seeing her life go into a depressing spiral. Her boyfriend (D.W. Moffett from Traffic) of one year—who is also her boss—won’t leave his wife. Her dad, with his new wife (played by Lustig) has a new baby that seems to have further replaced her in his life. Her plan to kill herself with a razor seemed too messy or painful. Her goldfish dies. She finds out her boyfriend’s wife is 6 months pregnant. She takes a bottle of Vodka up onto the roof of the bank where she works and after polishing off a pint, decides it is time to kill herself by jumping to the ground.

While this is going on, a group of bank robbers (led by Max Beesley as Charlie) have descended on the bank. The robbery is botched when the cops show up prematurely to investigate a jumper on the roof. Charlie ends up taking Selma as a hostage, telling the policeman to drop his weapon or he’d kill her. After the cop leaves, Selma tells him to go ahead and kill her right there. He tells he needs her to escape and promises to kill her later. If the cop had just shot, instead of unbelievably leaving his weapon on the roof, we could have all saved a lot of time.

This should make for an amusing, dark movie but instead it is filled with predictable twists and cliché: She is smoking and he tells her those things will kill you. Her response: “So?”

Based on a short film, Director Lustig took a pretty good script and did nothing to help make it better. It probably should have been left as a short film because at 89 minutes, it was still about 20 minutes too long.

She used many technical tricks to tell the story and they served as a complete distraction. At one point she shows Shawn and Charlie waiting four hours for another robber to arrive at “the hideout” and we watch the clock go from 11:30 pm to 10:30 pm to 9:30 to 8:30 pm. I could have cut out the whole few minute music-only section and moved on. It only reminded me how the film was dragging. There are also a couple of times when she has the screen fade to a blue tint or neon highlighted grainy film. It seemed as though she had just gotten a new editing toy and wanted to use all the features at one time.

Kill Me Later is destined for a quick trip to the video rack. It is a low budget film that you probably shouldn’t budget any of your bucks for, either.

Hank Yuloff (yes, THAT Hank Yuloff) is an advertising executive in Los Angeles, making him ineligible for those freebie movies passes you can get in front of movie theaters.

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