j* Movie Reviews 2019

Destroyer (2019)

Maybe this should just be called The Destroyed?

Firstly, it's all true, Nicole Kidman gives an amazing performance in this. She's split between two versions of her character Bell, separated by about 17years. Her younger Bell is far more Kidman as you know her, the older Bell is damaged, worn, frayed and frail... some would say the walking dead. So Nicole's performance gets the thumbs up.

It's quite a s.l.o.w film. The two stories told over split time take a long, long while to unfold. There's not much action. I'm not even sure there was that much drama, just witnessing a painful life. It is very interestingly and beautifully shot. The locations are grimy and gritty, and at times so are the characters.

But at the end of the day what was this story meant to have been about? Broken woman and her broken ends? Either way, it takes a full two hours to complete a kickflip. The ultimate underlying tension here seems to be: crimes, are they solved or committed?

J* gives it 2 stars.

PS. Look, to be fair, the ending does nail a twist. BUT the trouble is the rest of the film doesn't stick in your head enough, so when we hit the twist, we couldn't rewind and see if the rest of it was super-clever or not. From our memory we think that the apparent order of the time sequences is actually very different that the real order. It's possible that if we watched it again we'd find it was a super clever film, with super clever set ups. But the trouble is the experience of watching it wasn't entertaining enough to want to do that. So we'll probably never know. So it'll a remain a pretty, boring film that might be smart, but is too boring to hang out with and find out. And there's a lot of questions hanging about the true relationships between many characters.