Metacritic-Rezensionen

The truly chilling aspect of Killing Zoe is the correlation Avary makes between the gang’s nihilistic attitude and its penchant for violence. He pinpoints the schism in a precise and unnerving manner.

It must have been even more exhausting to make this film than it is to watch it. But it's made with a kind of manic joy that makes me suspect its writer-director, Roger Roberts Avary, might develop into a considerable filmmaker, once he thinks of something to say.

Ultimately, the greatest fault with Killing Zoe may lie in Avary's ambition. In trying to do too much (crime film, love story, psychological thriller, and dissection of an alienated generation) with a ninety-minute motion picture, his focus becomes blurred. Regardless, with a style that alternately recalls John Woo and Sam Peckinpah, and a tone that is nihilistic in the extreme, he has created a movie that, while obviously flawed, isn't easily forgotten.

Killing Zoe is a raucous, arty little neo-film-noir that comes equipped with a bucket of blood to splatter the halls of convention. It’s not terribly good but you keep expecting it to take off in unexpected directions.

Quentin Tarantino sans the witty dialogue.

Killing Zoe is another jolly bloodbath about disaffected young people having trouble getting in touch with their feelings, so they go on a spree, killing people, killing everything, tra-la- la-la-la.

For all its tough-guy posturing, Killing Zoe seems like a boy's plaything, the cinematic equivalent of pulling the wings off flies.

There have to be better ways of wasting money and killing time than the fashionable nihilism of Killing Zoe.

Mr. Avary's debut feature, fiercely ambitious but way out of control, is an orgiastically violent exercise in hand-me-down nihilism, much more firmly rooted in cinematic posturing than in real pain.

Violent, kinetic, and occasionally clever, KILLING ZOE is no match for either RESERVOIR DOGS or PULP FICTION, but it's a zoned-out rollercoaster ride of the first order.