Don't listen to the negative reviews

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

You Kill Me is a nice film that could have been better if it hadn't gotten so caught up in its own premise.Frank (Ben Kingsley) is hit-man and primary muscle for a Polish crime family in Buffalo. I've never really heard of the Polish Mafia before, but apparently they've got it in Buffalo. Frank is also a drunk and when he drinks too much he passes out, missing his chance to kill the head of a rival Irish crime family (all criminals seem to be ethnic in Buffalo), the head of the Polish mob, Frank's uncle, sends his alcoholic nephew to San Francisco to dry himself out. Out on the Left Coast, Frank gets a job preparing the bodies for showing at a funeral home, starts going to AA meetings and meets a really tough chick named Laurel (Tea Leoni). But as Frank tries to stop drinking so he can get back to killing, his crime family back home gets more and more squeezed by its enemies. Though Frank wants to see what he can make of life with Laurel, he's drawn back to Buffalo to make one final stand.I would guess that synopsis doesn't sound like a particularly funny movie, but You Kill Me is fairly amusing. Kingsley creates in Frank a none-too-bright, emotionally unaware "fish out of water", whether he's in an AA meeting or nervously asking Laurel out on a date. Frank also has an utter lack of hypocrisy about what he does for a living and why he does it. The story does ask you to accept that no one cares or gets upset when Frank tells them he kills people. I know that San Francisco is supposed to be all tolerant and stuff, but you would think that the folks out there would recoil just a bit from someone who performs murder-for-hire.Tea Leoni is also quite nice as a woman who's smarter and in some ways tougher than her professional killer boyfriend. But the movie never does enough with Laurel and that's related to its main weakness. T he idea of a hit-man being sent out to San Francisco to stop drinking and "get in touch with himself" is pretty neat, but the story gets trapped in that concept. Once Frank gets out there, you become interested in him and in Laurel and in the other people he meets out there, like his gay AA sponsor Tom (Luke Wilson). There's a funny and charming dynamic that develops but gets cut off as the movie keeps going back to the state of Frank's crime family in Buffalo. To the audience, though, there's no real reason to care about what happens to the Polish mob or bother with why they're better than the Irish mob or the Greek mob or the Chinese mob.One of the tricks of writing is learning to recognize that you may intend a story to go in one direction but once you start, the story may want to unfold in a completely different way. You Kill Me wanted to stay in San Francisco and say more about this world and these people Frank found himself with. For example, what burned Laurel so badly in life that a short, bald, middle aged assassin looks like great relationship material to her because…at least he's honest? But these filmmakers weren't paying enough attention to their own film to see that.You Kill Me is mildly entertaining, mostly for the good work of Kingsley and Leoni, but it's one of those movies that you can tell could have been a lot better.

Warmhearted AND black ? Does that fit together ? In this special case, yes. I've watched You Kill Me three times over the last two years, and I was always pleasured. The idea of a hit-man with a serious alcohol problem is a wonderful solo for Ben Kingsley. Despite or because of his age (he is born 1943) he is very believable and shows some very fragile aspects of his character. The dry, black, likable humor is, despite always present, a minor matter. What matters is, how someone needs and tries to escape his addiction, and how someone finds his love for being alive.The movie has a silent, sometimes slow pacing, with very good music, the jokes are not loud or direct, and there are only a few short action scenes. But it never becomes boring, except the audience expects a different genre. Maybe a name like Jim Jarmush as director would have brought more attention to the movie, as there is a similar sense of humor and weirdness in his works.Sadly, there are a few glitches in the script, where the authors seemingly didn't really know what to do, as f.i. with Laurel's character. How did she manage becoming so dry and lonesome ? She is defined only with a few words about her business which seems to be not so important to her, though she is very successful. She heard many lies from men, and that's all ? Tea Leoni has not many opportunities to shine, but she has a strong presence and gets the best out of her character, which is not easy in a movie created around Ben Kingsley.The ending is also a bit uninspired, although it is consequent.Ben Kingsley has a very diversified filmography since his first success with Ghandi (1982). Sometimes he seems not very selective, as with Blood Rayne. In many movies he is a big supporting actor who saves the project with his bare presence, like Sean Connery did. With You Kill Me he has got his own little movie and everyone can see how good he feels with it (and the other actors, too). And I think this feeling is transmitted to the audience.What I'm really sorry about is that the movie started only in 35 cinemas US-wide, according to box office mojo. The Alcohol addiction theme may be a serious problem for many but it is not taken too easy in this fairy tale. Since movies aren't those big film-rolls anymore but small DVD's, reproduction costs shouldn't be an issue, so, there only remains the distributor's fear of failure. At least I would TRY and not already give up before starting.

Writer/director John Dahl reinvented film noir for modern audiences with "Red Rock West" and "The Last Seduction" and although "You Kill Me" isn't up there with those spiky gems this droll macabre comedy/romance is a welcome return to form after forgettable flicks like "Unforgettable" and "Joy Ride". Sir Ben Kingsley gives a deliciously deadpan performance as an alcoholic Polish-American killer for hire named Frank Falenczyk. "Every time we send you out I have to make a call to find out if they're dead," moans mob boss Roman Krzeminski (Phillip Baker Hall). "I can't trust you anymore, Frank. Even if you are my nephew." Sent to Los Angeles to dry out the lonely hit-man finds unlikely redemption when he gets a job in a mortuary and meets a melancholy misfit played by Tea Leoni at her tart twisted best. Jeff Daniels has some funny lines as, well, let's have him tell us in his own words: "In a town with a ten percent vacancy rate a real estate agent is god, and that's what I am, a real estate agent."

This infectious quiet comedy grabbed me by the heart and didn't let it go. As a movie it worked at all levels - script, production, acting. The concept of the drunk killer being played straight could have fallen miserably if any of these parts of the film had failed. But every part contributed to the whole, to which I would like to particularly commend the director/producers for the beautiful restraint they showed with the film's score and music.Some of the commentators here expressed concern over the mobs of Buffalo, but that was one of the straightest jokes on film! The Polish and Irish squabbling over pennies and snow removal as if these were the meaning of life!? This sets the counterpoint for Kingsley brilliant portrayal of Frank, the reluctant AA member who begins to leave his old ways of living and join the living. He's left the dead of winter for the possibility of life while learning to dress dead bodies. In SF he discovers that he is no longer bound by tradition, in which like a loser he had done as he was told. And this counterpoint is extended by the petty mobsters moving with puffed up TV melodrama towards their deaths because they are bound to a code that they are unable or unwilling to break.Frank's hesitancy in embracing AA is well scripted and acted, but becomes brilliant once he decides to join and takes the part about honesty to heart. Following his motto about the importance of precision, Frank conscientiously chooses to be 100 percent honest. Some have said that anyone could have done that role, but I don't think many could have made it believable. It was scripted and acted well enough that I did not have a credibility problem with Frank's honesty.However, the brilliance of the movie comes fully to life with the introduction of Leoni 's portrayal of Laurel and the development of the relationship between her and Frank. In a very few short lines the two characters establish an awareness that they have a common quirk - unflinching honesty, which was affirmed with Laurel's humorous acquiescence to Frank's observation that the dead step-father's toes would need to be broken in order to fit his feet into the stolen bowling shoes.And I would like to stand and give Leoni my ovation and apology. I had made a point of avoiding her films until I accidentally saw "Spanglish.' In that movie she opened my mind to the possibility that she has some acting skill, because she managed to keep a thoroughly unlikable neurotic character human and interesting when it would have been very easy not to have been able to do that. Here, as Laurel, the subtlety of her reactions of surprise, disappointment, and the myriad other emotions she needs to act is a brilliant dance of words and discovery with Kingsley, who portrays with straight man comic brilliance his surprise and fear at wanting to reach for something in life other than a bottle or a gun.When Frank reveals to the group that he kills people, the reaction of everyone in the room is wonderful, especially Laurel's. You can see in their faces a bit of disbelief, then a kind of shock. But, as Frank continues to tell his story as a drunk, their initial shock is replaced by the alcoholic's recognition of his or her drunken stories in him. What he does for a living falls away as less important than living in the moment, alive, one day at a time. "I think it went better than you think," his sponsor says after the disclosure. And isn't that a beautiful and affirming life message from a hit man's AA sponsor? Too, too funny!I was so surprised at how good I found my first viewing of this movie that I watched it a second time, the following night. And it was even better the second time. Bravo!