Remembering Suicide Kings

Originally Posted on August 6, 2013.

I remember laughing when I first saw the commercial for Suicide Kings.

Not because it was funny, but because it already seemed so cliché--the snotty overprivileged kids, the less than half-baked kidnapping scheme which sees them quickly get in over their heads, even the casting of Christopher Walken. (The same, too, went for the pseudo-mature sensibility implicit in the title's metaphorical poker reference.)

When the movie hit cable a year later I saw it in the same spirit as most people see the likes of Sharknado, and it was exactly what I expected. The script's particular combination of humor and brutality, of quirkiness and snarkiness (Denis Leary's character going on and on and on about his fifteen hundred dollar boots, Walken's losing a finger), the conventional attempts to be unconventional (evident in the nonlinearity of the script), all lived down to my expectations.

Looking back on my response to that commercial, that seems to have been the moment when I knew that my sense of the whole indie phenomenon (especially the Tarantino rip-off/neo-noir side of it) had crystallized.

Alas, the indie films made since then have tended to reinforce that impression rather than change it.