A killer for hire gets caught up in multiple threads of revenge and betrayal in this black comedy.
By the time you finish watching this film, you will have watched parts of it four times. It jumps around to different viewpoints, adding different details, culminating in a predictable happy (ish) ending and a bad punchline.
A jealous, wife-beating bar owner suspects his spouse is cheating, so he has her followed. When his suspicions are confirmed, he hires the hitman to take her out, however his sister and her gambling dentist husband have decided to kill her and pass off her body as the sister's to collect an insurance policy and tries to beat him to it. Everybody is screwing up all over the place, and there's nothing funny about any of it.
If you hated Memento, you might want to give this a pass. The structure feels oddly similar for a supposed comedy, however I found nothing in it that made me laugh out loud. When we did get to the blood and guts gunplay, it was overly bloody, taking great delight in spraying, glopping, and throwing it about like kids in a splash pool.
While this tries to take elements from certain British films to make it seem smart and stylish, and the Australian scenery is at times quite nice, you end up caring about very little except for the cheating couple who wants to run away together. While they certainly made everyone else seem like horrible human beings in comparison, it's very hard to get past the fact that they're in the wrong as well. Especially when the actors' appearances make them seem like caricatures of their characters instead of believable people... with the exception of Pegg, who plays the cackling villain quite well.
It's a "comedy" that didn't make me laugh, but I did drop my needles once for the first gunshots, and there were three holy crap moments at the blood spray. They are not shy with that stuff. As a movie for knitters you might want to hold off, as the subtle differences in the re-playing of scenes might pass you by if you're not watching. Three out of five stars, but you might like it better if you're not expecting to laugh.
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