Killing Me Softly Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		0.5
Video		3.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		1.5

Killing Me Softly Blu-ray Movie Review

This isn't the Roberta Flack story?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 11, 2013

Note: This film is currently only available in this double feature: The Hot Spot / Killing Me Softly.

Shout! Factory is starting to release some double features on Blu-ray which pair tangentially related films together. Releases like this are almost always a hit or miss proposition, and that turns out to be the case with the two-fer offering varied but problematic modern noirs. The better of the two films on this release is undoubtedly Dennis Hopper’s 1990 opus The Hot Spot, a kind of fetid ménage a trois with Virginia Madsen essaying the kind of femme fatale role she seemed fated to play at that stage of her career, Jennifer Connelly as an apparently innocent young teenage girl who might nonetheless not be as naïve as she seems, and Don Johnson as a used car salesman who finds his libido torn between the two women. Killing Me Softly is a fitfully ambitious but ultimately abysmally failed English language outing by legendary Chinese auteur Chen Kaige, who attempts (pretty much completely without success) to infuse the noir genre with a heaping dose of metaphor and an almost soft core porn ambience. Heather Graham portrays a woman in an unhappy relationship who more or less stumbles into a tempestuous affair with a mountain climber played by Joseph Fiennes. Their incendiary interaction leads to a quick marriage, at which point the man’s troubled past starts rippling out into both of their lives.

Killing Me Softly is one of those “what the hell were they thinking?” films, one that pushes the boundaries of soft core just about as far as they can go without bursting whole cloth from the tony environs of London, where the film is set, to the seedy back rooms of the San Fernando Valley, where those real porn stars get their daily workouts. This is a film more or less entirely about illicit sex and sibling rivalry, and if that is both a spoiler and an embarrassment, in the wise words of some long ago sage, you ain’t see nothin’ yet.

Heather Graham portrays American émigré Alice, who has come to London to work on CD-ROMs (if you’re not laughing yet, just wait a moment). Alice has a nerdy but wonderful boyfriend named Jake (Jason Hughes), but on her way to work one day she makes eye contact with a mysterious stranger who wanders into a bookstore directly across the street from Alice’s office. Alice’s curiosity gets the better of her and she goes over to the bookstore and before you can say “bang” (if you catch my drift), the two are at it hot and heavy back at the guy’s apartment. It turns out he’s famous mountain climber Adam Tallis (Joseph Fiennes), a guy who managed to save a bunch of his climbing cohorts and who now has a major book out about him.

The bulk of the first part of this film is simply about the many positions Alice and Adam assume as they commit the act of love, but things get into more traditional thriller territory when the relationship turns more serious and Alice starts receiving threatening calls and letters, telling her to stay away from Adam. Of course the two end up marrying, Adam’s sexual proclivities become decidedly kinkier, and Alice begins to wonder, Suspicion-like, if her husband is actually a murderer. The supposed twist is that we perhaps have an homme fatale rather than a femme fatale luring an innocent to her destruction.

Heather Graham spends a great deal of this film looking bleary eyed, tearful and distraught, to the point that she's actually annoying after a while. Joseph Fiennes on the other hand tries to segue from being a tight lipped stud to something at least seemingly more menacing, but his facial expression never changes, making the whole attempt kind of meaningless. The supporting cast is full of typical red herrings and hyperbolic little turns, but it's all so patently silly it's a wonder these actors didn't just burst out laughing while they were filming certain scenes.

Killing Me Softly undercuts whatever putative suspense it might have worked up by being both kind of smarmily explicit (the sex scenes are rather graphic, shall we say), and also unintentionally hilarious quite a bit of the time, due to some of the most risible dialogue in recent memory. The climax (no pun intended) is completely predictable, but only adds to the unseemly subtext of this entire enterprise (armchair sleuths who are prone to ask why a certain character is in the film at all are going to solve the "mystery" about as soon as it starts). The whole “mountaineer in a higher orbit than mere mortals” metaphor that the film attempts to stuff down the viewer’s throat, in a bizarre gambit to make this sordid little enterprise seem literary, is just downright laughable.

Killing Me Softly Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Killing Me Softly is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Shout! Factory with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.84:1. My hunch is this must be an older master, for while the image is decently if never overwhelmingly sharp, it's also rather flat and textureless, almost as if this had been filmed on high def video. Colors are okay looking, but the film intentionally dabbles in the slate grays that make up a lot of London's overcast days, so there really isn't that much chance for things to really pop in a significant way. Contrast, while consistent, doesn't seem boosted to quite adequate levels most of the time.

Killing Me Softly Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Killing Me Softly features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix that is basically okay sounding, but which suffers from some minor high end distortion that becomes more noticeable in the film's more manic moments. Dialogue is presented generally very cleanly, though there's really not a lot in this sound mix to begin with other than a lot of heavy breathing interspersed with occasional screaming and yelling.

Killing Me Softly Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are offered on this Blu-ray disc.

Killing Me Softly Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you see no other film featuring Joseph Fiennes and Heather Graham boinking each other into oblivion, make it this one. On second thought, don't.