KILLER HEAT - Mark Reviews Movies

Killer Heat, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 26, 2024

The notion of a private investigator who has, perhaps, too close of a personal connection to his job is an intriguing one. It adds some necessary depth to Killer Heat, which otherwise plays as a traditional murder mystery with one noticeable gimmick that probably gives away too much of at least one the major twists of this story.

Being able to predict the solution to a detective yarn is no great accomplishment, of course, and neither should it be a sign that the story is unsuccessful. This one is decent regardless, although Matt Charman and Roberto Bentivegna's screenplay becomes so invested in the formulaic mechanics of its plot that it ignores the potentially compelling characters caught up within them.

The one exception to that is the private eye himself. He's Nick Bali (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a former New York City police detective who has made a new life and career in Athens. The guy has a shadowy past, and that's the way he'd like to keep it. It makes looking into the secrets of other people a bit easier, because he understands at least one of the most obvious motives that someone would hire a P.I. in the first place.

To make this detail a bit less opaque, the movie is based on a Jo Nesbø short story called "The Jealousy Man." Since the bulk of Nick's work has to do with suspicious spouses and potentially unfaithful partners, it is the jealousy that the man comprehends—too well, as it turns out from some flashbacks to Nick's old life. His investment in this work isn't just for money, which he doesn't really need, living in his uncle's spare apartment in the Greek capital and with no one apparently counting on him for financial support. He gets the suspicion and the paranoid feeling of needing but not really wanting to know the truth.

That makes Nick someone of a comprised nature, as well. While he may understand one side of the usual dynamic of his work, how does he feel about the other side of the equation? There's more to this character than the movie has room to explore, which is too bad. Nick's the kind of character who may be uncomfortable to get to know, but in a genre that's often exclusively about the process of finding clues and chasing leads and deducing the big picture from those puzzle pieces, it's somewhat refreshing to see a character whose, well, character actually matters beyond the formula.

Gordon-Levitt is very good in the role, too, as a man who's very good at his job but haunted by how much the work brings up his personal baggage. At first, his new case doesn't seem to be one of his usual ones. He's called to Crete to investigate the recent death of one of the sons of a local shipping empire. The man, an avid rock climber, fell to his death while scaling a formation on a remote island.

He had been a climber since childhood, and while the death has been officially determined to be accidental, the deceased's sister-in-law Penelope (Shailene Woodley) is convinced he was murdered. She doesn't know, but that's Nick's job to determine—without letting any other members of the wealthy, powerful, and likely criminal family find out that she hired him.

The mystery itself is fine, as Nick lies and sneaks his way into questioning the surviving family, namely the dead man's twin brother Elias (Richard Madden), who recently became the CEO of the shipping company following the death of the brothers' father about a year prior, and mother Audrey (Clare Holman), who's the silent powerhouse of the family behind the scenes. Nick gets some help from local police detective Mensah (Babou Ceesay), who suspects foul play and has been doing an off-the-record investigation of the family, and for all of that, the most interesting thing about the local cop is that he brings his dog everywhere. It's the little details that can provide some degree of personality to a familiar tale.

There simply aren't enough of those, perhaps, because too much of this feels overly familiar. Nick follows the trails of clues, interrogations, and possible motives, finding himself stymied because his typical go-to motivation of jealousy doesn't really fit here. The dead man, the black sheep of the family, had more reason to be jealous than anyone around him, and that's where any discussion of the mystery itself should probably end. The movie picks apart the particulars until one answer and then another are made bare.

Again, it's fine, if repetitive and lacking much of a reason to care about the conniving, backstabbing ways of a well-to-do clan of business magnates and criminals from a distance. The script and director Philippe Lacôte are smart to make Nick's investment the focal point, while dissecting the character's past problems, present guilt (He's figured out a "calculus" to drinking just enough to forget), and continual pursuit of the truth.

All of this, of course, leads to the big question of whether or not this character's troubling past and its influence on his current job are enough to elevate routine material. Killer Heat comes close to making those narrative and thematic connections, but ultimately, the winding and weaving plot seems to drive both Nick and the story more than any sincere study of this character.

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