Movie Review: 'The Kill Room'

The Kill Room (2023)

Directed by Nicol Paone

Written by Jonathan Jacobson

Starring Uma Thurman, Maya Hawke, Samuel L. Jackson, Joe Manganiello

Release Date November 3rd, 2023

Published October 26th, 2023

The Kill Room stars Uma Thurman as a New York City art gallery owner who has fallen on very hard times. Thurman's Patrice has fallen behind and the fast paced world of art patronage and is beginning to lose her roster of artists. Desperate for a way to buy back her credibility and place in the hierarchy of the art world, Patrice decides that money laundering doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Having recently been approached by a man named Gordon Davis (Samuel L. Jackson) regarding just such a scheme, Patrice decides to take Gordon up on his offer to pump new cash into the gallery.

The scheme works like such, Gordon will bring in a painting, Patrice will take the painting, run it through her database, price it and sell it to someone that Gordon is doing business with. Gordon's business involves having a hitman named Reggie (Joe Manganiello) choke out men who are marked for death by local Russian mobsters, something that Patrice is unaware of. She assumes Gordon is a drug dealer and thus doesn't feel bad about taking his dirty money. With Patrice's gallery giving Gordon's money a faux legitimacy, the cover up of payments for murders goes swimmingly.

Then, Patrice actually gets a painting and things start to take a turn. With Patrice having obviously agreed to sell a painting for the sum of $300,000, her assistant, Leslie (Amy Keum), cannot resist telling the art world about the first time artist whose work is selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The artist happens to be Reggie, the murderer for hire, and though his paintings aren't great, he does have a soulful and revealing aspect to his approach to sculpture. To appease the apprehension of the art world, Patrice gives Reggie the moniker 'The Bagman' and tells reporters and patrons that he's incredibly private about his work.

It turns out that Reggie actually doesn't want to be a killer. He was dragged into the world of so called 'wet work' by an obligation to his drug addict sister. In reality, Reggie is a thoughtful, soulful and sad guy with the soul of a real artist. His art just happens to involve throwing a plastic bag over the heads of bad guys and wrestling them until they stop moving and die. Naturally, Patrice will figure out who she's really dealing with and though you might expect a romance plot to unfold between Reggie and Patrice, The Kill Room sidesteps inter-personal politics by remaining firmly in the world of mocking the trade of art and how easily art patrons can be manipulated by buzz and the notion of scarcity.

The Kill Room was directed by Nicol Paone, director of the 2020 Thanksgiving comedy Friendsgiving. Paone is a gifted director of breezy comedy that relies on a charming cast to carry the day. Friendsgiving showed off the gifts of Kat Dennings and Malin Akerman to solid results. Here, Samuel L. Jackson takes much of the stage, when he's not shunted off screen, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Thurman on the other hand, comes off as sweaty and desperate. That's part of the character, a desperate striver, clinging to her last bit of reputation, but Thurman's high strung and underwritten character struggles to hold the movie together as its main star.

Thurman is not helped by a sleepy and forgettable performance from the usually reliable Joe Manganiello. The former Magic Mike supporting player has a knack for playing unexpectedly funny characters, see Magic Mike 2, but he's oddly muted in The Kill Room. Since there is no romance between his Reggie and Thurman's Patrice, the two have zero spark in their scenes together. Each appears to be going through the motions of an overly familiar caper plot where we are asked to root for a murderous hitman and a drug addicted, pompous art gallery owner to pull one over on the mob.

The death knell for The Kill Room however isn't the anti-chemistry of Manganiello and Thurman, it's the lame send up of the art world. The contempt that Paone shows for the art world renders the comedy of The Kill Room curdled and unpleasant. There is certainly a comic movie to made about the ways in which the art world is susceptible to fraud and how art is used to launder money, especially in areas of Europe and in the Middle East, that said, The Kill Room has nothing new or remotely interesting to say about the art world. The vague comic idea that Art buyers are dumb and greedy and deserve to be fleeced is not exactly trenchant commentary on the art world.

I don't think that The Kill Room is an entirely bad movie, it's just not a very good movie. The movie has a breezy, watchable quality, it goes down easy enough. Samuel L. Jackson may not be delivering a powerhouse performance but he appears to be enjoying himself in The Kill Room. Wearing a strange looking beard and a trademark beret, Jackson is all smiles as he orchestrates criminal deals between the mob and Thurman's overwhelmed art world denizen. Thurman's performance is scattered and often shrill but not completely terrible. Thurman hasn't been seen in a lead role in a while and seeing her lead this movie is refreshing in some ways, even as the role is not as strong as it should be for an actress of her caliber.

The Kill Room debuts for on-demand rental and digital download on November 3rd, 2023.

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