THE KILLER INSIDE ME is the attempt to portray the mind of a violence-prone psychopath in the trappings of a modern-day film noir, a la THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE or BODY HEAT. As a film it's a bit of a failure, purely because it lacks a single sympathetic character. Casey Affleck's lead is arresting, for sure, but he's hateful with it and just not very interesting when he's not involved in the film's more controversial moments.
Be warned: the film possesses one or two moments of extreme violence which are fairly sickening in their extremity. I don't mind extreme cinema, but you get the feeling that it's included here purely because the rest of the movie is so dull. It's overlong, for a start, and once the opening murder plot has been disposed with, the movie seems to just move slowly along while it searches for plot points and decent incident.
Far too much is made of the dull Affleck character, the women (Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson) are there to be victims alone, and the seasoned support (Elias Koteas, Ned Beatty, Bill Pullman and Simon Baker) feel wasted.
It all climaxes in one crushing letdown of an ending, an over-the-top piece of (unbelievable) spectacle that feels out of place given the careful realism that's come before. Tonally, director Michael Winterbottom delivers a movie that's all over the place at times, and you feel that he was well out of his comfort zone and not quite sure how to handle the material. It's obvious that the people who made THE KILLER INSIDE ME thought it was a great movie with that finesse of quality to it, but the sad truth is that it's fairly ordinary after all.
