Featured Movies
Partners
Killing Zoe
Eric Stolz and Julie Delpy star in Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary's violent heist movie. An American safecracker is inveigled into a Parisian bank job, which rapidly spirals out of control
There's a slyly self-referential moment at the start of Roger Avary's The Rules Of Attraction in which Killing Zoe is described as being "wrongfully considered a Quentin Tarantino film." Overshadowed by its executive producer's work in the mid 1990s, Killing Zoe actually marked the feature directing debut of Avary, the co-writer of True Romance and Pulp Fiction (stories conceived when the pair worked together at a video rental shop). Killing Zoe is loaded with the same modish references and cartoonish violence as so much of Tarantino's work, yet remains disappointingly meagre. It's thinly plotted, weakly written and devoid of the trigger-happy wit that made Reservoir Dogs, the film Killing Zoe most closely resembles, so effective. The principle focus is Zed (Stoltz), an American safecracker summoned to Paris for a bank job organised by brutal sociopath Eric (Anglade). On his first night Zed enjoys a brief encounter with prostitute/art student/bank clerk Zoe (Delpy), then gets taken on a drug-fuelled tour of Parisian nightspots courtesy of Eric's highly unstable gang (among them Gary Kemp). Next morning, hungover and strung out, the crew screw up the heist, which rapidly evolves into a siege. Conveniently for Zed, however, they've chosen the bank in which Zoe works and it's she who provides him with an exit from the ensuing bloodbath. Though Avary's direction is competently kinetic and the action effectively staged, the material is gossamer thin. Stoltz, so effective in Bodies, Rest And Motion, is a pale and aimless presence while Delpy, fresh from Kieslowski's Three Colours trilogy is criminally underused. (She just gets a sex scene and some screaming.) The real flaw though is more profound, Avary struggling to reconcile the intensity of the experience with his purposefully detached hipster tone. The result is cool to the point of blankness: there's barely anything here to engage with. Having begun with its foot on the floor, after an hour there's nowhere to go and the violence that drives the climax is curiously banal. Avary himself would subsequently split with Tarantino and search for a more individual style. Here the debt is too great and the sense is of one filmmaker paying homage to another who was, himself, in the business of making homages. Verdict Self-consciously cool but wearisomely unengaging heist movie that fails to make the most of a decent cast or, indeed, incorporate much of a plot. |
