The Killing - 3 stars out of 10

The Killing - 3 stars out of 10

There are aspects of the story that I really enjoyed and a few unexpected twists, but I'm perplexed by presentation of this film.  Is it an educational video?  Is it a documentary?   The narrator is distracting and constantly broke the sense of reality.  I know that many critics adore this film but it just screams "AVERAGE" to me.  Perhaps the problem is that I watched it right after watching "Ocean's Eleven" (2001), but where other ensemble films have memorable and likeable characters, "The Killing" has annoying characters like the dog lady, Marie Windsor (who just made me angry the whole time, and not in a good way), and Elisha Cook Jr.  The actor that I really latched onto was Timothy Carey, whose parking lot sequence was incredibly memorable.  But overall, I just didn't fall in love with these characters and therefore did not really care about what happened to them in the end.  I will admit that I thought that the end twist was fantastic and that, in spite of the narrator, I enjoyed the entire heist sequence; however, with the narrator painstakingly overexplaining everything in the final 30 minutes (where simple captions would have done), I just don't see the need for the first 45 minutes of this film.  This film is significant because it was Stanley Kubrick's first major film effort and because Quentin Tarantino has cited it as the inspiration for "Reservoir Dogs" (think about it), but it would be forgotten if not for that.  I would love to see a reimagining of this story set at the Kentucky Derby - this film just missed its mark for me.