Film / Reviews
Review: Destroyer
Destroyer (15)
USA 2018 121 mins Dir: Karyn Kusama Cast: Nicole Kidman, Toby Kebbell, Sebastian Stan, Scoot McNairy, Bradley Whitford, Tatiana Maslany
“You look terrible!” a colleague of Nicole Kidman’s character tells her early in Destroyer. He’s not wrong. An emaciated, worn-out old drunk with messy hair, a sallow complexion, heavy bags under her eyes and an uneven gait, she looks as though she could do with healthy meal, a long bath and a good snooze. Trouble is, it’s hard to get past this. There’s nothing wrong with an actor undergoing a dramatic physical transformation of the variety that Christian Bale specialises in as he inhabits his characters. But when a film constantly draws attention to the makeover with long, lingering ‘Look at me!’ close-ups and flashbacks, plus dialogue referencing the uglification process, you wind up watching the make-up and prosthetics rather than the performance. In this instance, it doesn’t help that Girlfight director Karyn Kusama’s self-consciously grungy crime drama feels rather like one of those landfill Liam Neeson vengeance thrillers given a ponderous, gender-flipped awards season makeover.
Kidman plays friendless, rather repellent LAPD cop Erin Bell, who perks up a bit at a crime scene where the victim sports a distinctive neck tattoo. She’s also received a dye-stained $100 bill through the mail. These are all the clues she needs to know that her dastardly nemesis, Silas (Kebbell), is back and taunting her. The reason for her all-round unloveliness, it transpires, is the long-standing guilt and trauma resulting from an undercover operation 17 years earlier. What actually happened is slowly revealed in flashback, where we find the younger, nicer and much more attractive Erin and her partner Chris (Stan) infiltrating Silas’s gang. In the present day, there are no depths to which this obsessed burnout will not sink to gain information that will lead her to nail the scumbag. This includes giving a vigorous if thoroughly unenthusiastic handjob to a gang member on his deathbed. Ewwww…we have a strong early contender for the accolade of Least Erotic Sex Scene of the Year.
To be fair, there’s a decent enough twist along the way and a big dollop of moral ambiguity, while a tense bank heist serves to demonstrate that Ms. Kusama knows her way round an action sequence. But for all the non-linear narrative trickery, the story itself is too thin, predictable and generic to bear that heavy weight of portentousness. During the slow trudge to the inevitable downer of a conclusion, even time itself seems to give up and grind to a halt.
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