Killer Joe (2012)

Why so much hype?

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.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

If you want to avoid Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, do NOT watch this movie. Dottie is a minor in the film and she has sex with an adult man. Another part of the movie that made me really sick was watching Matthew McConaughey forcing Gina's character to perform oral sex on a piece of chicken on Matthew's crotch making it look like he was getting oral sex. If people wanted to see sex they would watch porn not a movie.This movie receives a bad rating from me. I was left disturbed after watching this movie.

This movie is made only to spread free violence and sexual abuse trying to legitimate them with the absurd existence of mediocre human beings unable to express any human values in an alienated and cynical reality. the girl abused unable to understand the abuse but able to understand purity meaning, the father unable to understand the abuse of his daughter, the son able to make the deal because forced by the events which regrets his choice at the end... the daughter which kill his brother without any emotion telling she waits for a child from the abuse of the killer Joe. The movie ends after she is shooting without any reason in order to save his brother but killing the only one person really interested in her: his brother. This movie is absurd; it tries to get value only from perversions. Imho this movie likes pedophile, psychopaths, rapists, perverts, porn amateurs, whore-mongers, wore-wives, and so on. It is strange that a director as Friedkin could have produced this mountain of sh***t.

The movie is well made, but by the end, I found it to be so over the top with the graphic, needless violence and to a lesser degree, inappropriate sexual content. I was enjoying the movie until it begins building to a point where it was uncomfortable to watch the exploitation of a young girl by a father-aged culprit. We are never told exactly how old she is- but she could be as young as 16, so I found this part of the story a problem.The violence is average, movie-level action until a few scenes where it becomes too much and disturbing. I'm sorry that our culture now finds this stuff acceptable and entertaining. I'm 59 years old and no prude, but it seems that Hollywood keeps pushing their content to places that used to be simply wrong. The millennial crowd are becoming desensitized to this and I'm sure that the younger, school aged crowd are as well. This film is not for them, but I know they watch. I don't really understand why a movie like this is accepted by the same people who feign outrage at a fraction of the violence against women and children in real life.

Chris Smith has a problem. He owes a lot of money to some bad men, his dad can't loan him the cash, and he's sort of a lowlife. So he hatches a plan to hire a guy to kill his mom so that his younger sister Dottie can get the insurance settlement. This is never a good plan in the movies, and probably not in real life, either. As you may well deduce, things do not go as planned in this excellent crime thriller from an old hand, director William Friedkin.Chris (Emile Hirsch) knows a guy who knows a guy. The second guy is Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a Dallas police detective who moonlights as a hired killer. Nice work if you can get it, as they say. The intimidating Cooper lets it be known that he wants part of his fee upfront, and it's not a small amount, as a retainer. On the one hand, it's a heck of a lot smaller than the insurance payout will be. On the other hand, neither Chris, his beaten-down dad Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), nor his stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon) has the money - they were counting on the insurance to be able to pay off Killer Joe. These people are not adept at project planning.So Joe, rather than simply walk away from a situation from which he can't really benefit, comes up with an alternative: the family will "loan" him Dottie (Juno Temple), a twentysomething virgin (I know, right?) who's best described as being terminally naive. Now, a normal family might reject this idea outright: What father in his right mind would let an acknowledged killer have his way with his daughter? Well, these aren't normal folks. Besides, they got a killing to attend to.As you may logically conclude, once that little line of selling out your kinfolk has been crossed, there's no turning back. We know full well we're in for a heap of double crossing. And a lot of yelling and screaming. And, as a matter of fact, blood and deadness. So although, on the surface, the plot may look like it's from a low-rent Cinemax feature, the surprising intensity and viciousness of McConaughey and the remarkable supporting cast (particularly Gershon) drive this story a long, long way. Even the writing (by Tracy Letts, who wrote the play on which the movie is based) is crisp and plausible but not overly predictable. Killer Joe is a grimy, grisly, dusty, and foul-mouthed minor classic, presided over by an unlikely bad seed: Matthew McConaughey.