Kill List (2011)★★★☆☆

This movie is sitting precariously just at the edge of being a good movie but I don’t think it quite makes it. It’s well acted and the camerawork is great but the story doesn’t have enough substance to hook its audience.

I liked the characters from the start – the main group are all sympathetic relatable characters for the most part (at least as far as the audience knows at first) and the dialogue flows nicely. The group chemistry seemed complicated but realistic so my favorite scenes were the ones where Jay and Gal or Jay and Shel were just having a normal conversation.

I kept waiting for it to get really interesting and it never quite did. It didn’t even get particularly scary until the last fifteen minutes or so of the film. By that point there’s just not enough time to build in a real scare, especially not with the information the audience was given to start.

Also, they didn’t use Fiona’s character as well as they could have. They showed their hand too early with her being creepy in the bathroom – the final scene didn’t add anything because we already knew she was a creeper. I guess I mostly wish this film had done a better job of building suspense and then relieving it instead of…I don’t know, waiting around hoping that the sands of suspense will eventually form into castles?