Working from the increasingly dubious assumption that any mundane life experience is funnier when experienced by a hit man, John Dahl's lackluster black comedy You Kill Me tosses Frank Falenczyk (Ben Kingsley), Buffalo's most hard-bitten and hard-drinking assassin, into the touchy-feely clutches of a San Francisco AA chapter. It's not entirely clear why his employer (generic gruff-voice-of-authority Philip Baker Hall), who's understandably weary of Frank's tendency to pass out in mid-execution, sends him all the way across the country to dry out, apart from the rote opportunity for culture-clash humor this change of locale provides. But at least Frank is making new friends, including his AA sponsor (Luke Wilson, extremely subdued) and an improbable love interest (Téa Leoni) who may be his match in both prickliness and sang froid. Will he succeed in twelve-stepping his way back into professional homicide? One day at a time.
Kingsley's pseudo-American accent here, much like the one he employed in Sneakers, would flummox Henry Higgins himself, but the sexy beast is otherwise in fine form — responding to inane clean-and-sober chitchat by putting a coffee pot back in the machine with a sonic boom; deflecting the mandatory cry of "Hi, Frank!" with a cruelly dismissive "Yeah." The script, however, which plays more like the pilot for a wacky new Showtime series than a movie, does little more than set up potentially comic situations and then wait for the laughs to generate themselves. Most damaging is the failure of Dahl and the screenwriters, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, to settle on a coherent tone. Frank's New York crime family seems to be rooted in a specific and credible Polish-American milieu; once the movie shifts to the Bay Area, however, goofy caricatures abound, to the point where nobody so much as blinks when Frank reveals his true vocation to the entire AA community. Compared to Richard Shepard's underrated The Matador, which uses the premise of a burnt-out hit man to explore the meaning of friendship, You Kill Me looks both pointless and feeble — just talented actors killing time. — Mike D'Angelo