7/10
In 2010 a movie called The Killer Inside Me came out that, despite its big-name cast (Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba), sank like a stone. It was based on a novel by pulp writer Jim Thompson and featured some alarmingly brutal violence, particularly against women. It also wasn't a great film, which didn't help its cause.
Killer Joe is a better movie, but it's hard to imagine it not meeting a similar fate. It too has very pulpy origins (a stage play this time) and also contains stomach-knotting scenes of raw violence, some involving women. Unlike The Killer Inside Me, it's also savagely funny. At time the dialogue dips into corniness, but it's also smartly self-aware a lot of the time.
The cast is excellent - Matthew McConaughey is nearly unrecognizable as the ice-cold, implacable detective/hired killer of the title, and does a fantastic job with the role. Thomas Haden Church steals virtually every scene he's in (more by virtue of getting the best one-liners), and Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple and Gina Gershon are all strong as well.
My criticisms of the movie are two-fold - sometimes the cheesy dialogue and the actions of the characters are too outrageous to be credible, even for the sake of a pulp story, and in a similar vein, the violence and degradation feels a little too forced. One particular scene involving a drumstick of KFC will be forever seared into my brain, both due to its ridiculousness and how unsettling it manages to be. That's like a lot of the movie - careening back and forth between seriously unsettling and seriously absurd. A little more reining in could have made this a noir masterpiece instead of just "interesting and certainly memorable, but ultimately flawed".
Also worth noting that this is directed by William Friedkin, showing impressive gusto despite being some 40 years removed from his masterpiece The Exorcist.
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