Movie Log: You Kill Me

I am precisely the target audience for a romantic comedy about an alcoholic hitman from Buffalo -- well, maybe not the alcoholic part, but you know what I'm getting at -- so I rented You Kill Me almost as soon as I knew it existed. (The Wife and I saw a preview for it on some movie we saw a few weeks ago -- maybe I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With? -- and popped it onto the Netflix queue immediately.)

I don't think many people know this movie exists; I don't remember it hitting theaters at all, and it has crept out onto video with great stealth. And that's too bad, since it's a pretty good romantic comedy. (Though it would make a lousy thriller, and some people seem to think that's what it is.)

Frank (Ben Kingsley) is the designated hitman of the Polish mob in Buffalo -- the boss of this small gang is his uncle Roman (Philip Baker Hall), and the main lieutenant is Roman's son Stef (Marcus Thomas). Frank is apparently the only one who can point a gun straight, because the Polish mob is utterly incapable of killing anyone when Frank tips over into alcoholism, as he has done sometime before the movie opens.

Frank is supposed to assassinate the head of the Buffalo Irish mob, Edward O'Leary (Dennis Farina, looking distinguished and mob-boss-like but not particularly Irish while leading a whole bunch of redheads) as he catches a train to New York to meet with a group of Chinese moneymen, but he falls asleep in his car after drinking too much. (Again, these are pretty low-rent gangs -- O'Leary is riding Amtrak to visit his bankers so he can expand his territory, like some Amway salesman.) So Stef and Roman grab Frank and tell him he's going to San Francisco to get into AA and clean up...or else.

(The "or else" threat is mildly threatening at the time, but, in retrospect, there's no chance that Roman could do anything but maybe take away Frank's pension from the snow-plow company; Frank is the guy who shoots people that need to be shot. This particular mob has taken the detailed division of labor a bit too far for its own good.)

So Frank gets to San Francisco, where he's met by Dave (Bill Pullman), his minder. Tom is a real estate agent -- so he has gotten Frank a nice place to live -- and an utter jerk, so he rubs in the "I'll tell Roman if you don't quite drinking" part of the deal. Frank refrains from killing Dave, picks up an AA sponsor named Tom (Luke Wilson), and settles into a job preparing bodies at a local funeral home.

At one of his first funerals he meets the sarcastic Laurel (Tea Leoni), the step-daughter of the deceased. They have chemistry, and start dating.

And then the plot you probably expect starts to kick in -- Frank feels the need to tell Tom about his old job, and Laurel about both the job and the alcoholism. And O'Leary's mob starts putting pressure on Roman back in Buffalo...and only Frank could possibly do what's necessary and put two bullets into O'Leary's skull.

You Kill Me is consistently funny, and I didn't find it as dark as many people did. (On the other hand, I consider most black comedies to be just comedies -- that's the kind of sense of humor I have.) To place this in context, it's funnier than The Matador (though less consistent as a movie), but not as funny as Grosse Pointe Blank. If you liked either of those movies, or just think that a black comedy about an alcoholic hitman would be fun, you should enjoy You Kill Me.