American Killing (2016) Review
American Killing (2016) Review
Jeb’s (Trevor Peterson) cartoon is on the verge of cancellation, so the studio sends him and an eclectic team of writers to a secluded house in the mountains. As Jeb’s controlling personality and obsessive work ethic starts to push the team apart, he goes even further by planting spy cameras in places shared and private, obsessed on what everyone is doing.
Jeb is soon fired by the studio but he continues to spy in secret from his home leading him further down the road to madness. In his most desperate hour, Jeb seals his fate as a viscous madman by returning to the house and murdering his writers one-by-one, on camera. Past emotions and tensions flare, and while nothing goes as Jeb planned, the unforeseen twists, turns, and revelations make his snuff film a violent spectacle sure to go down in infamy.
American Killing was a tough title to research online prior to writing this review as, unbeknownst to me, the film was not originally called American Killing but Wichita. It’s never a good sign when a movie undergoes a name change after its initial release and before hitting retail. It normally means that the product sucks and that the distributors are hoping to disassociate with the iffy response received under the film’s original name.
There’s nothing new to see here, in fact I ended up switching the flick off; choosing to give the climatic fifteen minutes left a miss, confident that I would not be missing anything that I hadn’t sat through a hundred times elsewhere already. I found American Killing ill-formed, predictable and occasionally flat. This feature film writing/directorial debut for Matthew D. Ward (working alongside co-director Justyn Ah Chong) ends up being nothing more than a dreary, half-baked serial killer flick.
The fact that this has been sat on the shelves for three years should give you some idea that perhaps it wasn’t a title that distributors were queuing up to buy. There’s an element of Peeping Tom, with the voyeuristic leanings of the lead character Jeb, filming his victims in their death throes, but that makes it sound more interesting that it actually is. Jeb goes from failing script-writer to maniac without much evident provocation and I could never understand why the team he has working with him don’t just all get up and go home but then American Killing is that sort of film, and much like Jeb’s own scripts this one simply doesn’t work at all!
