Killer Heat

Jo Nesbo is not merely a “serial” author he is a “spree writer” who mass produces crime novels, children’s books and short stories. Some of those are converted into movies already, some of them even good, including Morten Tyldum’s 2011 thriller Headhunters, some of them bad to the bone, such as Thomas Alfredson’s 2017 “Scandi-noir” procedural The Snowman. With five more Nesbo-written titles for film and television in various stages of production, may the whole Nordic Pantheon and the fallen heroes of Valhalla help us all. The newest adaptation of his work is an Amazon-MGM production that has recently landed on Prime Video.

At first glance, it seems like a no-brainer: an adaptation of a prolific and somewhat “cinematic” writer by a couple of somewhat reputable screenwriters – Bridge Of Spies’ Matt Charman and House Of Gucci’s Roberto Bentivegna – set as the English-language debut of the “festival darling”, Ivorian filmmaker Philippe Lacote, to be filmed on the gorgeous locations on Crete with a number of internationally recognised and recognisable actors. However, even the title is misleading, pointing to a mid-90s softcore erotic thriller, but the lack of heat of that kind proves to be the least of its problems.

Our protagonist is Nick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a private investigator and the titular character of Nesbo’s story The Jealousy Man. He is a former NYC cop with troublesome past and alcohol problem who moved to Athens and specialises in investigating marital infidelities. He is summoned to the island by Penelope Varadakis (Shailene Woodley) to investigate the death of her brother-in-law Leo, who supposedly died in a “free solo” rock-climbing accident. She thinks he has been murdered, but the police, lead by the Inspector Mensah (Babou Ceesay), do not want to dig deep.

There is a solid reason for that behaviour: the Varadakis family, lead by the matriarch Audrey (Clare Holman), run the island, and Leo's identical twin brother Elias (Richard Madden) is set on protecting the family business and status from all prying eyes. The investigation has to be handled carefully, but the question is whether Nick is capable of it. The additional question is the one of Penelope’s angle, since she had history with both twins who were also insanely jealous of each other.

The trouble is that Lacote is in favour of telling rather than showing, so he relies heavily both on dialogue that is clearly over-written and on voice-over narration that adds another layer of explanation to the already explanatory dialogue, while the short bursts of action are handled in a muddled way. The mystery itself resolves in a mind-boggling fashion with an inflation of plot twists that demand an extreme suspension of disbelief ability from the viewers, but for that a part of the blame could be relegated to the writer of the source novel.

On the semi-positive side, there is some handsome lensing of the cinematography-ready locations by Andrew Dunn, who captures Crete as a real place where people actually live. But that is also somewhat ruined with Lacote’s insisting on exoticism by the means of filling the soundscape with stereotypically Greek-sounding score by Joseph Shirley to enhance the notion that our protagonist feels foreign there. It is out of character both for the character, who resides in Athens and actually speaks some basic Greek, and for the filmmaker who drew attention internationally for his gritty-realistic portraits of Abidjan and the paradigm of Africa devoid of exoticism of a European, colonial gaze, including Night Of The Kings.

The same “close, but no cigar” outcome is also reserved for the actors. Madden plays both Elias and Leo, the latter one in god-awful flashback sequences, with zero charisma, which is fitting for one of the brothers, but not for the other who was considered “a dreamer” and “a creative person” by his loved ones. Holman is effective as Audrey in the two scenes she has, and Ceesay is so convinced in his interpretation of the cop that he is almost convincing, if we can get along with the setting that the lead inspector on a Greek island is of the African origins, for which we should forget all we know about the recent Greek political history centred on the question of refugee crisis.

There are problems with the two leading actors as well. Woodley has a habit of collaborating with big-name filmmakers on their riskier projects and sometimes that backfires, which was the case with Greg Araki’s White Bird In A Blizard (2014), while sometimes her performance flies under the radar of scrutiny, like in Michael Mann’s Ferrari (2023) or Oliver Stone’s Snowden (2016). That might be the case here as well, since her character is a bit of a cipher, and she manages to imbue Penelope with some superficial emotions. Her Snowden partner Joseph Gordon-Levitt has clearly seen brighter days of stardom, but here combines having fun playing the boozy detective and sleepwalking in the role, which he usually does in films that are beneath his acting abilities.

In the end, Killer Heat is neither a killer, nor it is hot, even by the means of sheer weather, given that our characters sport jackets and sweaters, which is a dead give-away for the winter off-season. It does not work well as a neo-noir either, sunny or not, because most of the creative team, the cast and the crew mistook overcooked for hard boiled.