Nic not in best nick
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Toby Kebbell, Sebastian Stan, Scoot McNairy. Looks can be deceasing PSSSST! Ever wondered what Nicole Kidman would look like if she: (a) went without sleep for a week; (b) went without make-up for a month; and (c) lived under a bridge for a year?
Well, your dream screen trifecta has come in, and better still, Destroyer will give you two long hours to contemplate its star’s anti-makeover.
While Kidders has uglied it up previously for fun, profit and (Academy) awards, nothing will prepare you for the state of top-to-toe decay in which she presents herself here.
In what can only be billed as a crime drama so grim and grotty it should come with a Hazmat rating, Kidman plays Erin Bell, a Los Angeles detective who somehow still has a job in spite of multiple issues with anxiety, alcohol, anger management and personal grooming. Erin is working a murder case where, in what might just be a cinematic first, the victim is arguably in better shape than the cop hunting for her killer.
What is significant about this case is that Erin has a hunch it may point the way to a shadowy psychopath she has been chasing for the last 17 years.
Silas (Toby Kebbell) is the kind of criminal mastermind that is all madness, all badness, 24/7. One of his favourite pastimes is duping his half-witted henchmen into playing Russian roulette without the promise of a prize at the end.
A series of flashbacks inelegantly staggered across Destroyer’s timeframe fill us in on the finer details of Erin’s beef with Silas.
Once upon a time, when she still had a conventional complexion and a passable hairdo, the younger Erin worked her first undercover assignment infiltrating Silas’s armed-robbery operations.
She had a partner back then, too. A cool, good-looking fella named Chris (Sebastian Stan). What became of him, well, it ain’t pretty. But neither is Destroyer.
The whole experience is one slo-mo slap to your face, while Kidman maintains the most cadaverous countenance seen in a movie without zombies or vampires.