Movies

Back in the late '80s and early '90s, the Montana-born director John Dahl made a name for himself with a series of nifty, darkly comic neo-noirs bearing wonderfully hard-boiled titles like Kill Me Again, Red Rock West, and The Last Seduction. The past decade has been less kind to Dahl, and though his latest, called You Kill Me, has the outward appearance of a return to form, it may in fact be the worst thing he's ever done—an inert, tone-deaf mélange of The Sopranosand Six Feet Under, about an alcoholic assassin (Ben Kingsley) in the New York Polish mafia who becomes a better man (and hit man) by joining AA and going to work in a San Francisco mortuary. The script supposedly kicked around Hollywood for years, and its age shows in the torrent of rimshot-worthy gay and Polack jokes, the gay-but-not-gay-seeming AA sponsor (Luke Wilson), and the submissive love interest (Téa Leoni) who doesn't mind that Kingsley's a killer as long as he's, you know, not gay.