Review of Kill Me Again

Introduction

Jack`s (Val Kilmer) is a mess. His life is in tatters and he needs a way to claw his way back into society. He is a bar fly by day and a gambler by night. When he meets Fay (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) he thinks his life could be on the up, a change in the air, better times ahead. Fay knows better as she`s just stolen a large slice of the Mobs money and has no intention of giving it back.

Video

Framed at 1:85 the video is nicely presented, although it does leave the viewer feeling as though he is missing something. It has been cleaned up nicely with no noise or artefacts present, but this process has maybe lead to a downturn in colour vibrancy.

A lot of the film is either set at night, or in the desert, neither the most conducive scenario for excellent colour clarity. The depth of the images suffers the most, with an almost black and white film that`s been coloured in later look about them. This is particularly evident in Jack`s office, when he is speaking to Fay early in their relationship.

This does improve later on in the film when the locations change, but never attains a really good balance between clarity of image and depth of colour.

Audio

A 2 channel Dolby Digital stereo soundtrack, which is a bit tiring for long term listening. It does well to capture the mood of some scenes but is equally as bad as it is good in others. This will not make your system sound great and is definitely not a great demo disc.

Features

Only interactive menus and scene access are listed on the box, but there is clearly a trailer accessible from the menu. This trailer shows the extent that the main feature has been cleaned, as the colours are simply awful. They are extremely washed out to the point of faded, so maybe my comments earlier were a little unfair if this was the starting point the producers had to work from.

Conclusion

This is really your classic femme fatale, film noir, and dodgy ending type film in another package. It`s been done before and it will be done again, to varying degrees of success. This it has to be said is not one of the most successful variants of the genre.

I could not get into this movie and must admit to taking two stabs at watching it all the way through. This may be because I`m not Val Kilmer`s biggest fan, or maybe because I have the nagging doubt that this is another example of an actor with a name getting his friends or family work in a low budget film he/she is willing to put their name to. In this case I suspect Joanne Whalley-Kilmer`s name to be a little more than a coincidence.

Carlton have released some far better movies in their Silver Collection, and I am sure that there are many more to come, most much more notable than this one. Not a film I will be rushing to watch again.