Kill Me Three Times is a rarity. The Australian flick is similar to a number of Post-Tarantino cheap, multiple-character-weaving crime knockoffs (Destiny Turns on the Radio, 2 Days in the Valley, Suicide Kings, Love and a .45, etc) that came out in the 90s, and featured a loosey-goosey swagger and paint-(blood)-by-the-numbers double-crossing plot. Usually those films are easy to shrug off (Tarantino himself lifts heavily from influences that excite him, so its not an actual cinematic crime), but Three Times is made insufferable by the overbearing musical score. That it cues hundreds of times.
We are introduced to a killer-for-hire named Charlie Wolfe (Simon Pegg). Charlie first delivers some cheeky lines about how he considers himself un-killable. Then director Kriv Stenders (Red Dog) pans out over a gorgeous Australian beach and then that fucking cheeky guitar-drum song that will play after almost every line in the movie, is endlessly cued. It’s an unneeded punctuation that — at first — just sounds cheesy. But by minute ten, it’s apparent that this is an elevator song that we’re forced to listen to. It will stop at each floor that the elevator (film) is programmed to open at. A new character will emerge on that floor, get on for the ride, and that stupid incessant song will play again at each floor.
A part of me feels bad for ragging on a score so harshly because it was something someone was hired by the director to do. But when a movie (and score) are trying so hard to be cheeky, likable and dark, if there’s one aspect that feels overbearing, each time it’s repeated feels like a device that winks, and says, hey, are you ready for this? it’s damn near torture.
So who is Wolfe out to kill? A waitress (Alice Braga), who is cheating on her abusive husband (Callan Mulvey) with a hunk in a beach trailer (Luke Hemsworth). Trouble is, a dentist (Sullivan Stapleton) is in major horse-racing debt, and his scheming wife (Teresa Palmer) has decided that her sister-in-law could die at their hands and they could escape debt through some insurance policy fakery. Double crosses occur. A dirty policeman (Bryan Brown) wants in on the action. Cash is stacked in personal safes. You know the drill.
What makes the score worse is that Stenders does have some admittedly good ultra-violent genre moments. And they all happen when Stenders allows silence. When there is silence we hear blood push through the throat of a victim as they struggle to breathe. Bullets hit people they’re not intended for. All these gleeful bloody moments happen in silence. Until the blood spits out. And that’s the punctuation that’s actually needed. And laughs would still happen.
Even without the score, Kill Me Three Times would be a mediocre (at best) crime potboiler. The characters aren’t very defined beyond their stock roles: abusive husband, cherubic paramour, wise-cracking assassin, etc. If you want to laugh at ludicrous kills and blood spurts, there’s some of that here. So are there some screensaver-worthy aqua-wave beach shots. But there’s no real reason to care who ends up with any of the money that’s at stake — unless that fictitious character pays someone to make a new score. And restrict the amount of times they can actually cue it. Even a
Brian Formo is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel. You can follow him on Twitter at @BrianEmilFormo.
