The Pulp Fiction comparison is apt, as the story is told in three acts that are conspicuously out of order, with the middle act coming first, followed by what should have been the first act, and then finishing with the third act, a small bit of which plays as a prologue. The exact reason for this temporal shifting isn’t entirely clear, other than the fact that it allows the filmmakers to show us the story’s criminal acts unfolding without us knowing the how’s and, more importantly, the why’s. This, of course, generates a certain amount of suspense, but in hindsight it also makes clear that the narrative is rather rote when told in straight linear fashion.

The tie that binds the film together is Charlie Wolfe (Simon Pegg), a handlebar-mustachioed professional killer who ends up straddling two different criminal plots. The first is a plan by Nathan Webb (Sullivan Stapelton), a mild-mannered dentist with serious gambling debts, and his indomitable wife Lucy (Teresa Palmer) to murder a woman named Alice (Alice Braga) in order to collect insurance money. The second plot, which we don’t learn about until midway through the story, involves Alice’s husband Jack (Callan Mulvey), the skeevy, alcoholic owner of a bar/hotel, hiring Charlie to murder Alice because she has been cheating on him with Dylan (Luke Hemsworth), a hunky gas station attendant. It is in following Alice to kill her that Charlie stumbles upon the murderous insurance scam, and the two plots end up getting entangled to the detriment of just about everyone involved (including a corrupt police officer played by Bryan Brown).

The fact that so many people end up dead in often excruciatingly violent ways is hardly new to the noiresque crime comedy genre, but something about the way it is handled in Kill Me Three Times makes it feel particularly unseemly. Stenders is clearly going for a tone of astringent humor, but his film often veers too wildly from scene to scene, with the acts of bloody carnage feeling overblown while the humor feels often strained. He benefits from the presence of Simon Pegg (who last handled big guns in Edgar Wright’s 2007 action movie parody Hot Fuzz), whose assassin-for-hire has an amusing sense of blithe disregard that never quite feels sociopathic. Teresa Palmer (Warm Bodies) is also memorable as Lucy, whose determination to pull off Alice’s murder plays as an amusing commentary on women who must prop up their weak-kneed men. When Alice conks Nathan on the head with a tire iron and seems poised to escape, it is Lucy who runs her down with a relentlessness that is both funny and scary. Speaking of Alice—as the object of not one, but two plots to kill her, one would think she would make more of an impression, but Braga plays her as a rather bland would-be victim, which makes her impending death feel ugly, but not necessarily personal. It doesn’t help that we don’t understand for nearly half the movie why anyone wants her dead, and I kept waiting for it to be revealed that she was, despite her relatively meek appearance, deserving of all this homicidal animosity. Alas, as it turns out, pretty much everyone on screen except Alice is deserving of punishment.

All of this is not to say that Kill Me Three Times doesn’t have its morbid pleasures. There are some great throwaway visual jokes, including a car driving down a beach highway past a sign that literally says “Dangerous Coast: Lives Have Been Lost,” which you know is probably a real sign in Australia but also feels custom-made for the movie’s body-count-heavy plot. The narrative has a few nice twists and turns that keep things lively, although the cast don’t seem to have all been on quite the same page (for example, Pegg and Palmer play their characters like cartoons, while Braga and Hemsworth seem to in a serious drama). Wolfe’s comical seen-it-all mentality works for his character, but reflects poorly on the film at a meta-level, suggesting that there isn’t really anything new here, and what the film does it doesn’t do well enough to earn the Coen and Tarantino comparisons to which it is clearly aspiring.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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