‘We go in. We get what we want. We come out...’
Roger Avery is best known as Quentin Tarantino’s longtime friend and producer. He shares a story credit on Pulp Fiction and the two now co-host their film podcast, The Video Archives Podcast. Following the huge success of Reservoir Dogs, Avery was given the opportunity to write and direct his own debut feature, Killing Zoe. Alas, it never threatens to reach the level of Avery’s work with Tarantino…
Zed (Eric Stoltz) is a safecracker who finds himself in Paris to help his old friend, Eric (Jean-Hughes Anglade), with a bank heist. Upon arrival, he meets call girl Zoe (Julie Delpy) and the two soon find themselves intrinsically linked in a way that neither of them could have foreseen.
Avery wrote Killing Zoe in two weeks and said that he set out to capture the nihilism of his generation. Celebrated critic Roger Ebert described Killing Zoe as “Generation X’s first bank caper movie”, but despite these grand statements of intent, the film itself is pretty mean-spirited and shallow. The opening moments in which we see Zoe arriving in Zed’s hotel room and playfully flirting with him are excellent, but as soon as Anglade’s odious antagonist Eric arrives, the film stops being something to enjoy and starts being something to endure. The relentless hedonism in the first half of the movie soon becomes tedious, and the heist, whilst containing some visually interesting moments, drags on for way too long. One of the things that made Reservoir Dogs so effective is that the audience never sees the heist, only the aftermath. Avery should have taken some of that restraint and applied it here. The pop culture references (Nosferatu, Star Trek, etc) feel forced rather than earned, and the whole thing feels horribly dated now.
Killing Zoe is probably worth watching for completists as Avery is such a key part of Tarantino’s rise that there is enough to make the film interesting, but for everyone else, the film deserves to stay back in the ’90s, where it belongs. It’s hard to become invested in a film in which most of the characters are detestable.
