Directed by Jon Keeyes
Written by Charles Burnley
What motivates a star actor to make the decisions they make, take the parts they take, make the movies they make, is likely a very loaded question which depends very much on each individual making those choices, and also depends on where they are in their career arc. I ask the question specifically of this film because of the presence of Antonio Banderas, who is perhaps one of the great living, working actors of our time, especially of the international contingent who have found success in America. His most famous collaborations from an artistic perspective are with fellow Spaniard Pedro Almodovar. But his stateside success has found him in a number of otherwise silly films, like the Zorro series or other action films. My man works. So while an accomplished actor when he wants to be, it’s not at all surprising to see him pop up in a silly low budget indie movie made by a filmmaker without a feature film rated above 5 on IMDb.
Banderas plays Mikael, an accomplished private investigator who happens to run into down on her luck former librarian Cassie (Alice Eve), whom Mikael takes under his wing into the seedy world of PI work, thanks in large part to her attention to detail and ability to retain information. But when Mikael turns up dead, Cassie is thrown into a shady world of underground human trafficking, having to get her bearings quickly to work with Mikael’s killer Jamie (Shelley Hennig) to uncover the horrific trafficking ring while finding justice for her lost friend at the same time.
Cult Killer is such a bad name for a movie, let alone this movie. I supposed you could argue that there is somewhat of a “cult” with the trafficking ring, but it’s not really a cult. And who is the killer here, is it Mikael, is it Cassie, is it Jamie? It just doesn’t make a ton of sense and I think they could have come up with a much better title. But all that being said, it falls in line with the screenplay of this film, which is honestly rather poor. This script follows just about every standard convention, corny line and twist of plot a movie like this could have. It feels somewhat like it could have been written by AI, which I know is a real problem and real threat to the industry right now. And that’s not a compliment by the way, it feels born of a lab where the writer thought he was taking the best elements of the genre and throwing them all together, but took no care to craft anything real and meaningful along the way.
The good news is that the cast is mostly game for this type of material. Banderas, as previously mentioned, is a very good actor, and while he’s not given a large part here (he dies pretty early and that’s not a spoiler) we don’t get his charm for very long. But Alice Eve steps nicely into the lead role, and alongside her Shelley Hennig plays a fun, if not slightly deranged (for good reason), frenemy. Don’t get me wrong, there are still some pretty silly performances on the periphery, like Nick Dunning and Olwen Fouere as the creepy, deviant old couple, or Matthew Tompkins as the supposed mastermind of the operation. Eve and Hennig just manage to rise a bit above everything else around them.
For as bad as this movie really is, and it’s pretty bad top to bottom, filmmaker Joe Keeyes did manage to keep me engaged throughout, and built some real tension and thrills down the stretch to lift an otherwise abysmal script out of the dirt. I can’t say it was anything too impressive, but given the material, I was pleasantly surprised to not feel like I wanted to turn the movie off for the entire second half of its runtime. That in and of itself is a minor victory. But don’t mistake me, this is a bad movie, one which I would have a very hard time recommending to just about anybody other than the hardest of hardcore fans of either Banderas or Eve or the genre. It has very few redeeming qualities.
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