The narrative of “The Kill Room” starts with a bulky Reggie (Joe Manganiello) moving down the street while listening to a true crime podcast. He steps inside a bodega to voice his concern over a bad cup of coffee, but first, the owner is not too pleased with that and tells him to f*ck off. So, Reggie chokes the owner to the ground and the struggle he faces to breathe while all the skid marks from Reggie’s heels starts to fade is painted with broad strokes. That is a rather rough start accompanied by even rougher efforts in the early plot. Nicol Paone’s “The Kill Room,” expanded but comically broad critique on the world of art vise a versa a crime novel, did however get better.
When Gordon (Samuel L. Jackson) a Jewish mobster who also runs a bakery, offers a tantalizing deal to Patrice (Uma Thurman). Gordon states that his trusty assassin Reggie will make paintings of a high valuation purely for the money launder and in return all he requests is for her to keep the artworks in her gallery and not sell it. ‘In return’ she gets a large cut.
The cash strapped Patrice is under pressure and on the verge of losing her gallery along with all of her clients, making this deal too good for her to say no to. However, after she had an intern who shared photos publicly of the art, it seemed as if they took the entire art world by storm. Flair soon became a household name due to his incredible work and soon everyone wanted to buy the paintings done by the artist who went by “The Bagman”.
In a critical analysis of the art market, The Kill Room, is far more cutting then Velvet Buzzsaw. We see Patrice’s gallery struggling because she values ethics and quality over profit and refuses to buy reviews, cover herself in paid marketing, or deal with misogynist male artists. “When there are big sales, there’s a lot of power over the narrative,” she tells her intern. In other sequences, we’re presented with rival dealers boasting about having made a sale to an arms dealer, the son of an African dictator, and a Russian oligarch. As a result of what they are willing to do, and what they are not willing to abide by, Patrice is now so far behind that she begins to grind her morals, so in turn, she starts withering down her ethics as well.
If it means saving her business, he may be a drug dealer which she can ignore, however it is nothing as terrible as a hired hitman. We do get a glimpse of his actual handiwork, some of Reggie’s, The way his particular murderous scenes are shot is quite stylized. Still, they still manage to polish it. Hutching Gillian L has done her job and managed to entwine her audience with the world of art with her cross cut editing. But to put it simply, the film intends to superimpose them together. That type of blending does not do any justice to the underworld portion of the film. There would have needed to be a serious escalation of violence to mask what is agrarian humor within the broad critique of the art scene to sharpen the comedy.
Miss in forma stays fascinating in terms of the film’s main characters whose work is splendid and solid. The wonderful part begins with kitty, who performs unsteadily in the beginning, in my opinion, when she is overly addicted to Adderall in the first scene, but eventually gets herself together. During that awkward on set reunion of her and Jackson (to stress, they never shared a scene in Pulp Fiction), both of those aging actors do not forget the elaborate changes in their strategy and raise the stakes even further.
Over here, disregard the inherent silliness of their parts, they showcase beautifully flawed individuals in an exaggerated universe rather than cartoon characters interacting with a cartoon world. If that was the sole aspect of “The Kill Room” movie stars simply reveling in each other’s company that would have sufficed.
And, yet, Paon’s film goes a step further and delves deeper as well into bloodlust performance art, so to speak. Not to mention the film ends with a fulfilling climax. “The Kill Room” tears into the shameful dealers and vicious collectors by taking a jab at fads, lack of supply, rich consuming artists, and classic capitalism. Although the trope of ‘killer with a heart of gold’ is overly used, it seems to have worked wonderfully here because of Manganiello’s unabashed on screen persona. Nevertheless, the sheer thematic weight of “The Kill Room” renders it an amusing and captivating, albeit early, work.
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