Kiss or Kill

The attention-grabbing beginning of this movie finds two scam artists, having accidentally killed a victim, stumbling on the possibility of blackmailing a football star, and setting in motion a quirky road movie with hints of black humour.

I have to say, this sketchy synopsis recalls the type of plotline the Coen brothers might use. This is slightly misleading - the film is darker, less gimmicky and ultimately less fun than standard Coen brothers fare - but nonetheless the film does share several of the brothers' failings - noticeably an inability to create a consistent tone or convincing psychologies for the lead characters. We know the most important character suffered severe trauma as a child, yet we learn little about her other than that, and her boyfriend seems an even bigger mystery.

Also, to illustrate the problems the film has with tone, the film has noirish themes, but has incongruously bright sunny photography. It also contains one brilliantly funny sequence, in which a cop finds he knows his partner less well than he thought, but frankly this scene looks like it comes from another movie.

However, the film is always watchable. It does look attractive, even if its main stylistic tic - continual jump cuts, presumably in homage to Godard - does jar after a while. Moreover, a brash, confident central performance from Frances O'Connor definitely holds the attention, and I did feel that I cared for her basically hard-to-like character.

Although the film is only a partial success, it still looks like the type of film that could develop a cult following.

Surprisingly, the genre hasn't been worn down to the nub, despite dozens upon dozens of examples pointing to the contrary.

Annoying, overused, Scorsesean jump cuts aside, "Kiss or Kill" has enough good things going for it to make it the best Aussie import I've come across in a great long while.

The director is Bill Bennett, whose other noteworthy effort was a Sandra Bullock picture that wasn't really worth bragging about (has anyone made a Sandra Bullock picture worth bragging about?) He's not too keen as a director, really, cross-cutting scenes that haven't got anything to do with each other, overdoing the jump cuts to force a free-and-easy atmosphere onto the proceedings, but as a scenarist he's excellent. The plot begins like any other ordinary "Bonnie and Clyde" xerox, but it flows free from there, as if Bennett just let the characters take over, rather than the plot conventions.

The acting, uniformly, is pretty close to fantastic. There's Frances O'Conner as the fast-moving but slow-thinking Nikki, who as a child (opening sequence) sees something so horrible at her home that it's no wonder she chose a life of crime. Matt Day is equally skilled as her lover/partner, though we aren't given as much insight into his character as we are Nikki's. Chris Haywood and Andrew S. Albert are complete naturals as the cops on their trail. For those two detectives, they get a brilliant variation on the "Pulp Fiction" bacon discussion that is the film's highlight.

If Bill Bennett fails directing the film into Tarantino-esque jazz rhythms, he succeeds ultimately by giving us an Australian outback that's so barren and unmistakably evil that one might think the "Mad Max" road barbarians were already bopping around, not patient enough to wait for the apocalypse. Characters talk of "unfathomable tunnels under the desert" or live in an abandoned nuclear testing facility, and all through the film there's subtle hints that the outback is one spooky, spooky place. Also, Bennett's decision to use no music (and I mean NO music) is a masterstroke, and he employs a champion cinematographer named Malcolm McCulloch to give the film an eerie, chilly atmosphere. Balance that atmosphere with the occasional joke and cheery scene, and "Kiss or Kill" keeps an audience on its toes.

Films like this usually disappoint as they drift into convention at the climax and towards the summary. Creativity in the third act of most movies these days seems quite lacking, in fact, which made the last third of "Kiss or Kill" such a pleasure to watch. I'll just say that thankfully, the surprises and expected twists were, like the rest of the movie, driven by character and personality, instead of the requirements of the genre.

This is probably one of my favorite movies.I first saw Kiss or Kill when it first came out in 1997.It is not your run of the mill road movie it is more complex.There is a sense of paranoia between the lead characters throughout which adds to the mystery of the whole movie.I highly recommend this movie and I hope it comes out on DVD soon.9 out of 10****

Any film that is prefaced with an extract from a Dylan Thomas poem deserves some praise and this film doesn't disappoint in most departments. This is essentially a film for students of film because it plays with so many cinematic conventions and mixes seemingly irreconcilable genres. Kiss or Kill is both film noir and a road movie, playing both genres against each other with the aid of Godardian jump-cuts to heighten the uneasiness and underlying menace the film evokes so well. In this sense, the film is visually audacious and technically brilliant and that's thanks to the direction which is on-target most of the time. My only gripe was the inclusion of some dubious story lines that detracted from the film's overall uneasy effect. Thankfully the acting of both leads compensates such flaws. Worth watching with a Film Theory book in one hand and popcorn in the other.

This is a sort of modern day film noir directed by Bill Bennett and stars Matt Day and Frances O'Connor. Day and O'Connor play a young couple in Austrila who are a couple of con artists and they mostly scam married men who pick up O'Connor in a bar. Things are going good until someone actually dies and they wind up with a videotape, on that videotape is a celebrity named Zipper Doyle, who is a football star, and he's having sex with a young boy. Day and O'Connor go on the run with both the police looking for them and Doyle trying to kill them. There are several more deaths but you don't see who murders who and Day and O'Connor get to the point where they can't trust each other. It's a pretty good movie that was a huge hit in Austrilia.