Razzie Awards 2011

Winner
Worst Supporting Actress
Jessica Alba
(shared with Little Fockers, Machete,Valentine's Day)

Didn’t Jessica Alba’s character suffer enough in this flick? Yet the Razzies still awarded her the prize. They did include her full body of work for the year, which is even harsher. Or was it the onscreen violence against her that drew their ire—though that’s contradicted by acknowledging those other titles? Perhaps it’s a tough-love approach, as the cheeky award’s history frequently reveals animosity toward actresses who can’t exactly hide their beauty. Somewhere I still have that Playboy Sex in Cinema issue with her on the cover, which she claims to have not endorsed!

This second adaptation of The Killer Inside Me has a hazy,…

Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me is extremely well-done technical filmmaking – but overall it’s not very good. It’s a period-set noir in 1950’s Texas, with Casey Affleck (as Lou Ford), a blasé, placid deputy sheriff with a natural zing for double-murders. The first murder of the film is so grisly and revolting that you want to scream out “anti-entertainment.” Morbid curiosity might keep you watching, the faint of heart should avoid. Jessica Alba is bare and tantalizing as the disreputable town whore. Kate Hudson is Lou’s regular girl, the one he’s supposed to one day begrudgingly marry. Simon Baker and Elias Koteas do most of the film’s best secondary acting within a large cast that also includes Ned Beatty,…

Repugnantly violent and ironically toned, "The Killer Inside Me" is both repellant and compelling. As a character study of a man whose issues are deep and nasty, the film presents an interesting portrait that, while sometimes intriguing, is often uninvolving. It all makes for a decidedly mixed experience.

A narratively fractured Texas-noir where characters and motivations unfold slowly, "The Killer Inside Me" pays less attention to full-bodied plot than the repulsive idiosyncracies of its main character. Murder, revenge, and cover-ups abound, but director, Michael Winterbottom, keeps his focus on those committing the acts and not the acts themselves. With a lead character as despicable as Casey Affleck's Deputy Sheriff, it is difficult to invest in Winterbottom's vision.

The film oozes…

Since I kind stumbled into a Neo-Noir binge this December I thought it was time for me to revisit one of the genres strangest examples. I remembered almost nothing about The Killer Inside Me except that Jessica Alba gets her ass spanked and her faced bashed in. Side note: If you have a problem with violence against women in movies, skip this review and never even come close to this movie.

Watching it again, I really must say, this is one of the weirdest, most incoherent and puzzling films I have ever seen. For pretty much the entire runtime I had no real grasp what the story was all about. Character decisions, dialogues, scene transitions, plot points and turns… it…

Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me is a repellent and grimly violent adaptation of the uncompromising Jim Thompson novel of the same name. Thompson's novel is violent and Winterbottom presents it in stomach-churning detail.

I had seen the film previously and been impressed by it on release. At that time it was the name of Michael Winterbottom that appealed to me. I really like Winterbottom's genre-shifting career, as he moves around idiosyncratic material without leaving much of a touch, other than the mark of quality.

However, I returned to the film after seeing Manchester by the Sea, and I wanted to watch more of Casey Affleck and some of his best films.

The Killer Inside Me is not a perfect…