THE KILL ROOM - Mark Reviews Movies

The Kill Room, Shout! Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 28, 2023

As soon as the plot gets in motion, there's an inevitable moment that's going to happen in The Kill Room. It will be the turning point, not only for a couple of characters in this story, but also for the story itself, and it will answer a vital question for what this movie is trying to do. Which is more important to screenwriter Jonathan Jacobson: the characters or the plotting?

The setup here is fairly clever. It involves Patrice (Uma Thurman), the owner of a struggling art gallery in New York City who is starting to see that her dreams might be dashed very soon. She and her business need money, but it's not coming from art sales, because the elite and wealthy art collectors don't seem interested in buying what her gallery is selling, or from a local art foundation, because its operators only want to invest in galleries that can prove to be worthwhile because of sales. Patrice is stuck, in other words, and something drastic and unexpected will have to happen if her gallery is to survive.

Enter, literally, Gordon (Samuel L. Jackson). He's having some money problems, too, although his don't have to do with having too little of the green stuff. In fact, he has too much of it, illegally gained and in need some legitimate cleaning. Gordon's a drug dealer, operating out of a bakery across the river from the gallery, and after a colleague is arrested on tax evasion, he realizes that he'd better come up with a plan to put another front of legitimacy on his income.

What's one thing that the IRS doesn't investigate that much when it comes to investments and assets? Well, that would art, which can be good or bad, since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and valuable or worthless, because the price of art is entirely dependent on the fluid market of availability and popularity. If money from Gordon's illegal business is exchanged with Patrice's legitimate one, no tax agent is going to do much investigating.

There's a hitch, of course, and that's the matter of an actual piece of art in the middle of this transaction. For that, Gordon enlists the help of Reggie (Joe Manganiello), a hitman under the sizeable umbrella of the criminal enterprise in which the two men are involved. Gordon's convinced that anyone can make a piece of modern art, and Reggie winds up proving that theory.

The joke—an obvious one—is that he also proves another critique of the art world, because his work becomes popular as soon as the first "sale" is made—despite the fact that no one, besides these three people, have seen it. It's simply because some art collectors heard that a piece sold for a lot of money, and if someone paid that much for it, the art must be both good and valuable. Soon enough, Reggie, known as "the Bagman," and his paintings become the talk of the New York art scene.

This is, of course, a lot of exposition and plot, and the big moment, obviously, will be when Patrice, who has no idea that her new artist is a professional killer, discovers that Reggie, who starts using the very same plastic bags that he uses to murder people in his new pieces, is an assassin. The build-up to that moment is somewhat amusing, because Jacobson and director Nicol Paone give a sense of the politics and eccentricities of the movie's takes on the both the art world and this criminal underworld, and filled with some potential.

Most of that comes from the performances. Thurman has fun as the despondent and frantic gallery owner, while Jackson plays Gordon with the natural cool that has become his solid trademark. Then, there's Maganiello as the hitman, whose stoic countenance suggests a cold, businesslike mentality to murder—until he starts to take making art seriously. Even he seems surprised by the idea that there might be more beneath his tough surface—and frightened that his art might reveal a bit too much honesty about what actually is underneath his exterior.

In other words, the characters do matter a bit more here than a means of moving forward the plot, so that key scene, when Patrice figures out the truth about Reggie, is all the more important to the course of this narrative. Are the characters the point of this story, or is it about the current complications that exist and the additional ones that Jacobson can devise?

Let's just say that Patrice's reaction is played as a joke, that the she and Reggie have one conversation about why he got into this line of work and how he feels about, and that the rest of the story revolves around an elaborate scheme to isolate a Russian oligarch at the most prestigious art show in the country. Ultimately, The Kill Room becomes so busy with the mechanics of the plan that the filmmakers forget they have a decently intelligent premise and some intriguing characters supporting it.

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