Reggie (Joe Manganiello),  Patrice (Uma Thurman),  Gordon (Samuel L. Jackson), Grace (Miya Hawke),  an artist/painter, scam, laundering money through an art gallery,  Leslie (Amy Kerum), Nate (Matthew Maher), Liv Morgan/Gionna Daddio, The Kimono (Debbie Mazer), Nicole (Marianne Randon) Anika (Dree Hemingway), Director Nicol Paone, Writer Jonathan Jacobson, Dark Comedy/ Thriller, Reggie “the bag man” becomes a painter of trash and it sells,  he’s also a hitman who uses plastic bags to strangle his hits, drugs, 

Sometimes you see films you don’t know what to make of. The Kill Room is one of those films. It has a great cast and an interesting premise but movies similar to this have done it much better. I understand writers trying to come up with new ideas but this one was too close to others we’ve seen in the past which makes it not all that impressive in the end.

Patrice (Uma Thurman) is a struggling art gallery owner. She has one marketable talent, played ironically enough by her daughter. She needs another star artist she can sell to the rich and greedy alike. When a man named Gordon (Samuel L. Jackson) comes into her space and offers her a deal she can’t refuse; she wonders who the new painter/artist is. This baffles Jackson’s character as well. Until he convinces his friend, Reggie, a hitman known as “the bagman” to be the muse they are looking for. This turns out to be a good thing for everybody involved until it isn’t. 

This film has an interesting premise that involves Eastern European gangsters, art critics, and overzealous art fans as well as competitors. The writer Jonathan Jacobson combines a lot of different things to make this story fun and engaging throughout. These different ideas wouldn’t seem like things that would be combined in a film like this but they worked well together. The entire cast buys into everything the script asks them to do.

This cast as I’ve mentioned is stacked with Academy Award-nominated actors and some newer actors. The hitman played by Joe Manganiello was a character I gravitated to the most because he had this mistake in his life that let him down this path but he doesn’t want to be defined by this path or job for the rest of his life. This new talent he found may be the way out of his past life. And I can relate to that.

The rest of the cast played by Thurman, Jackson, Hawke, Mazer, and others are pretty funny in a dark way. This whole world of art can be a bit cutthroat no pun intended, but the way all these actors sell this story is fantastic. They completely buy into this world created for the film. Pros like Thurman and Jackson could just use these roles as a paycheck but they don’t. They invest wholly in the roles and what motivations their characters have. The supporting cast is fantastic as well.

There was one technical aspect of the movie that wasn’t that good. There were some problems with the editing. During a scene at an art gallery, people were standing talking to each other and a woman in a pink dress and her friend kept walking behind the people talking in the foreground. The editor kept showing these people time and again instead of other characters or having them change clothes or something. This looked pretty bad from my perspective. Maybe it’s a mistake from a lack of directing films. Who knows? That was a small quibble though. 

There is a thriller aspect to the movie and combined with all the other stuff going on in this movie it is like a cherry on top of a cake. If the filmmakers didn’t stick to the ending it would be sad because this premise was a fun one. The mystery of how all of this unfolds was the most entertaining part of the story.  I didn’t know what to expect when I started watching this movie but I was pleasantly surprised.  I liked it.

3 stars

Dan Skip Allen