Thomas Jolliffe (supertom-3)
The problem with Instinct to Kill is that the basic premise, about an abusive and also murderous jilted ex-husband, is so old it is unbelievable, and the major problem with the producers doing this film is that they have done it badly.Where this film differs from the likes of Sleeping With the Enemy, and the countless other theatrical and made for TV movies, is that this takes the action approach. It tries to take this idea that would work best with a TV stalwart as the leading lady, someone like Connie Sellecca who starred in a similar, and superior, but not that great film, called Deadly Affair. This now revolves around the abused wife getting training in self-defence and weapon handling from Martial Arts star Mark Dacascos.For any Dacascos fan thinking that this, coming out post Brotherhood of the Wolf, is going to be good, with a good budget, and probably narrowly skipping theatrical release. Well, they would be wrong, it is not good. This was shot before the release of Brotherhood and his subsequent and much deserved catapult to bigger heights. Had Christophe Gan's not given him the part of Mani then he would probably still be doing movies like this, thankfully though he is on to brighter pastures for the time being.The film opens with a brief and inanely edited piece of history, from the moment that Tess met her husband, Beckett, played well by Tim Abell, and shows us in a brief 5 minute history the stages of their relationship, from the ridiculously happy wedding, to the immediate next section 6 months, or so, later when he turns violent. It shows right up until she discovers that he had murdered 9 women. This is all done very hurriedly and as a simple way to get the history, and plot, out the way early on. Beckett is locked away in an Insane asylum, but of course escapes. He also happens to escape ridiculously easily, but in fairness the character points this out and gives the guard a good beating because of his ineptitude and having obviously not listened in his training classes. Anyway the film plods along with little idea how to coherently move from A to B through good storytelling, and by placing the odd random decent moment every now and again, for instance we get some insight into why Beckett treats women the way he does, in a scene where he visits his father. Now this scene was good, actually fairly well handled, but we have no hints to it before and after. You need to hint at what his motives are before revealing, not just have it come out of the blue in one scene. Having seen a film like this so many times though, I kind of guessed from minute one that it probably stemmed from an abusive mother, it's the classic criminal motive in these sorts of movies (damn that Sigmund Freud for spawning this mother stuff in so many movies). What they did well was the scenes when Beckett is violent towards his wife and other women, albeit one coming after an obligatory, but welcome (for some entertainment) sex scene. Abell plays the character well, he doesn't over do it, which is good for this sort of thing. The scenes of his violence towards women are very well done, they don't hold back, as a bigger studio film may have, and they get a sense of realism while successfully pitting the audience well and truly on the side of Tess and against Beckett. Abell's performance is decent, and he gets the best scenes. I definitely give credit there. The rest of the cast are okay. Dacasco's is playing a tough guy, with a softer side, and he gets one good scene when he talks about how his wife got killed. Being a personal trainer, in self-defence, he of course is introduced to the protagonist in a bar room brawl. As a fan of Dacasco's he don't like to see him trying to play a tough man, all scowls and booming voice, because he can't. That's not him at his best. He's best as the calm and enigmatic hero, like Mani was. Mani wasn't trying to do the Arnie styled posturing and growl. Dacasco's is too much of a poster boy and lacks the bellow in his voice to do it. He needs to be action men who know they can whip someone but don't give it away, they'll show it off buy actually beating some anonymous henchman to the ground. Few guys of his size can look really tough and give off a `don't mess with me vibe', Jet Li can, he has an amazingly intense and stoney faced glare. I think Dacasco's speciality lies in playing not your typical action man, he's too good an actor, as far as action men go, to be wasted like that and it just makes him look bad. Missy Crider is okay, she's very pretty and not too bad an actress, she certainly does well, especially in the more harrowing scenes. Also Kadeem Hardison is here but he is horribly miss-cast in too straight a role. Many comical actors can't really act, so they should stick mainly to funny roles, Kadeem is such as case. I was waiting for him to do something funny but he didn't. They tried to have him do the action man scowls and bellows but he to cannot do it. It's like when they cast Dacascos and Hardison they took no note of their specialities.The direction is bad. The best scenes work because of writing and performance. The saving grace of this film should have been the fight scenes, but they are horribly captured. The director has absolutely no talent or appreciation for making movies. He seems to have no clue how to film his scenes. The fights are fairly well choreographed but at times are difficult to make out because Stevie Wonder was doing such a stand up job behind the camera. Another laughable point is a lot of the inane moments and stupid dialogue that the actors have to spout. It ranges from good in Beckett's violence scenes to really bad in others. When Dacascos is teaching Tess about self-defence and talks to her about using `anything around you' as a weapon, he also mentions a newspaper (yeah right, give the assailant a paper cut!) there are a lot of similarly inane bits of dialogue. Also Becketts disguises, while some are good, some are merely a stick on moustache and a prosthetic nose. He uses this to get information from people that Tess knew, and that he also knew, people who know his face because they attended his weddings and no doubt a few Sunday lunches while the marriage was still hunky dory. They do not recognise him at all! Until of course he simply removes his moustache and then all of a sudden they looked shocked and say `Jim, its you'. Now I know this film isn't the only one guilty of this, it's a piece of classic cinema cliché, Superman being a classic example, whereby Superman's disguise consists of a pair of glasses, a slight alteration in hair style and a more slouched posture, and the world is fooled. This film however makes it far more laughable, particularly because of the stupid reactions the other characters have.Overall this is a film that must have given off bad vibes to fans of any of the cast, having been a low budget TV-movie that has been delayed for two years, a delayed TV movie! Oh my god! Enough said. This is all nonsense but it does have its moments and some genuinely harrowing scenes, in amongst the drivel. **
