Dating, drinking and death

>> Téa Leoni overlooks Ben Kingsley’s alcohol problem and hit-man status in the
illogical comedy You Kill Me

by MATTHEW HAYS

Filmmaker John Dahl was on some kind of crazy roll in the early ’90s, when he wrote and directed two truly fun thrillers, Red Rock West (1992) and The Last Seduction (1994). But something went terribly wrong in the years since, with Dahl helming such so-so vehicles as Unforgettable (1996) and Rounders (1998).

For his latest effort, You Kill Me, Dahl has assembled an able cast. Ben Kingsley understands how to play a mobster beautifully, while Téa Leoni has a great comic talent. Kingsley plays a hit man who is screwing up his work due to his out-of-control alcoholism. The family he works with is so pissed off that they send him to San Francisco to dry out. There, he must attend A.A. meetings and work to stay sober.

The only part-time work he can get involves a funeral home, where he helps to prepare corpses for open-casket funerals and wakes. This supplies one of the film’s rather-too-obvious gags—here’s a man who feels right at home around cadavers. He meets Leoni while on the job, and asks her out on a date. His first confession to her has nothing to do with his criminal trade, but rather his drinking problem. Kingsley has no moral problem whatever with his C.V. of carnage—as far as he’s concerned, they had it coming—and instead feels that all he needs to do is get his drinking under control so he can keep offing people for a living.

You Kill Me has a few standout moments. In particular, Kingsley falls off the wagon at one Irish wake where he’s lured back to the bottle by Jayne Eastwood (this woman is a great Canadian national treasure, and she shows up in virtually every American film shot in Toronto).

And the unusual, unlikely chemistry between Kingsley and Leoni reminded me of the Art Carney-Lily Tomlin pairing in The Late Show. But You Kill Me has one nagging flaw: even in the universe of comedy, there needs to be some internal logic, and it’s never really explained why Leoni looks past Kingsley’s severe drinking problem and hit-man status. Even by the screwiest of screwball comedy standards, that’s not really believable.

You Kill Me opens this Friday, July 6

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