Forumrxes
Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.
AnhartLinkin
This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.
Plustown
A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.
Raymond Sierra
The film may be flawed, but its message is not.
wfalcone
I thoroughly enjoyed Kiss or Kill. I thought it was well acted, stylistically shot and terribly romantic! I recommend this film for couples that want to make it a Blockbuster night. Written and directed by Bill Bennett, this movie is about two cons who accidentally end up on the wrong side of the law and on the lam. Frances O'Connor absolutely sizzles stealing almost every scene. Matt Day holds his own as her tough as nails boyfriend with the big heart. Kiss or Kill's supporting cast charms as well with each character introduced breathing new life, meaning and comedy to the movie. I didn't think there was one bad performance in it. Kiss or Kill was witty, clever and, in some scenes laugh out loud funny. Kiss or Kill get's my seal of approval. Bust out the popcorn!
Robert J. Maxwell
Interesting murder/love story, set in the Australian outback. Way out in the outback. A road picture in which a reckless young couple are pursued by both the police and a gangster who wants something they've taken from him.Simple enough so far. The problem is that the couple seem to be ahead of the people tracking them, yet from time to time, as they stop at some crummy motel for the night, or stay at a friendly couple's house, a dead body or two turns up the next morning. So who's doing whom around here? The young lady (O'Connor) has a habit of sleepwalking and doing things at night that she is unable to remember. But Al (Day) is doing things too -- robbing their acquaintances, for instance -- and trying to keep these secret acts from her.The ending, which renders the concept of implausibility corporate, winds up with both the young folks innocent of any serious crime, and they live happily ever after.Despite the fact that people get burned to death, raped, and have their throats cut, it's overall a pretty good-natured movie with little gore or horror. Actually, there is some humor, mostly involving the pair of obscene detectives who are tracking the suspects.At one point the cops are forced by their responsibility to watch a tape which has recorded the goings on in a motel room, searching for an image of O'Connor. In one episode on the tape a middle-aged man slips into bed with a blond young boy. ("Eh, this ******'s sick.") Farther on, a dark girl strips and begins servicing her customer. One cop says that it looks like O'Connor. The older cop stops the tape, peers at the screen, and says, no, that's not her. That's Felicity. The first cop thinks for a moment and asks, "'Ow do you know air nime is Felicity"? "Because she 'as no teeth," answers the other. They both nod and start the tape again. There are several such incidents, all the more funny because neither of them laughs. They're given the best lines, no doubt about it. "Well, this isn't the end of the world but you can see it from here." I don't know exactly why the film is edited in such a way that many cuts have a few frames missing. I guess it saves time and adds some zip to what is already a pretty fast-moving story. I didn't find it as distracting as it might sound. Never any sense of the director's hollering, "Hey, Mom, I got a CAMERA!" Australians are generally a lot of fun. I like the guys especially. They're heavily into sports, beer drinking, jokes, bonding and a lot of other masculine stuff -- without a touch of narcissism or meanness. I like them because they demonstrate that manliness doesn't necessarily take the form of John Wayne. They haven't painted themselves into a corner by adopting too narrow a definition of gender identity. Hard to believe that Greek warriors would write poetry in the evening and rush into combat mano a mano the next day.
sol-
A stylish Australian road movie with ideas in terms of trust and morality, the film is nevertheless rather repulsive, not only in terms of its story, but also how the film is put together. The protagonists are drawn completely unsympathetically as very cold-blooded criminals, which gives one little reason to care what happens to them. The characters who are chasing them are not much better developed either, and thrown into the weird mix there is an array of meaningless supporting characters which the protagonists run into, and some odd subplots that they become involved in but which are never fully explored. Frequent use of jump cuts makes the film looking interesting, but it also make the film feel uncomfortable, like they do not belong. Either way, it is all quite watchable, and if the content appeals one's taste, it may well be worth a shot. However, if there is no appeal to watch it, I would recommend staying away.
Spleen
The director wants to show us a car skidding to a halt. So he films a car skidding to a halt, from a single camera angle; then he shows us the whole shot but with several consecutive frames simply missing. He does this continually, throughout the entire film, so that a character can't walk across the room for the most trivial of reasons without jerking from place to place like an electron.In an interview, Bill Bennett justified this practise by saying that we don't really need to see the missing footage in order to tell what's going on. An appalling argument. We don't need to see ANY of the footage in order to tell what's going on. We could probably reconstruct it from the dialogue track alone - even then, we'd probably have a fair idea of what's going on if every tenth word were removed. Why doesn't Bennett just mail us the script? This is yet more proof that artists shouldn't theorise about art. Bill Bennett clearly thinks he has the right to impose his failed experiments and half-baked theories on my aching eyes - and I resent it.It's more of a pity because the basic script is fine. (What there is of it. Some dialogue has been improvised - a touch that sometimes works well, sometimes doesn't.) There's a decent suspense story here and there's a nice touch using remote regions of Australia which I'd rather leave a surprise. The story is strong enough to transcend the childish editing and push "Kiss or Kill" into the "watchable" category. How good it would have been if edited in a sane manner is hard to tell. I simply can't evaluate such abstruse hypothetical questions. Nor should I have to.