Kill Chain (dir. Ken Sanzel, 2019)
Because this direct-to-video film does not yet have a Wikipedia page, typing Kill Chain into the search bar takes you directly to the concept that is found in military strategy. It’s the sequence of events in dealing with an enemy: find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess. What does it have to do with the film? Not a whole lot, but I guess it sounds cool?
Kill Chain follows a group of criminals, dirty cops, and other lowlives over the course of one particularly eventful night in an anonymous city. Most of the characters don’t have names, because why bother? Just call Enrico Colantoni the Old Sniper in the credits and be done with it. Everyone’s thinking of him as Kenneth Mars anyway. Executive producer and hypothetical star Nicolas Cage does get a name as Arana, the proprietor of a rundown hotel, which positions this film as either a particularly low-rent John Wick knockoff or a hyperviolent version of Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train.
It feels like 2019’s answer to the deluge of Tarantino imitations that the nineties produced, but without the smidgen of style that those invariably bad movies had to have to get greenlit in the first place. Maybe it’s just that the digital photography that’s ubiquitous now just makes Kill Chain seem especially tossed off as more of a product than an actual story. I know that there are worse Nicolas Cage movies, but it feels so perfunctory and rote.
oliveresque 