Killer Heat and the return of the acceptable mid-budget thriller

Killer Heat
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Rather than try to rewrite the thriller rulebook, Prime Video mystery Killer Heat is content to be just fine ā€“ which is far from a bad thing.


There was a time when the film industry was partly underpinned by perfectly okay if unspectacular mid-budget thrillers. Recognising that not every movie could be a four-quadrant multiplex filler, or the kind of worthy period drama favoured by awards season voters, studios like 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures regularly put out such genre fare as Pacific Heights (1990) or Double Jeopardy (1999). On occasion, they might throw in the odd monster, resulting in creature features like 1997’s The Relic.

Whatever form they took, they didn’t cost too much money, included a star or two, and had a decent chance of making a few million in cinemas before they kept on raking in profits through video (later DVD) sales or rentals. Then, as the evolution of the on-again, off-again Hellboy franchise reminds us, the market for home entertainment shrank in the 2000s and 2010s, replaced by streaming, while rental died almost entirely. With it went an entire sector of mainstream filmmaking, with the mid-budget thriller largely replaced by a greater emphasis on fewer, more expensive tentpole movies on one end, or lower budget dramas on the other.

All of which brings us to this year’s Killer Heat, which from its anonymous title down to its cast to its by-the-numbers mystery plot, feels like a throwback to a 90s era of mid-budget filmmaking. It isn’t a classic, and doesn’t try to be ā€“ which, in an odd sort of way, feels rather refreshing.

Based on a short story by pulp thriller specialist Jo Nesbø, Killer Heat follows the exploits of Nick Bali (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a New York private detective (and former cop) who’s moved his business to Greece following the collapse of his marriage, later detailed in flashbacks. Bali’s latest case takes him to Crete (where the Icarus myth came from, he notes in his hardboiled narration) where billionaire Leo (Richard Madden) has recently fallen to his death in what appeared to be a climbing accident.

Read more: Is the thriller genre making a comeback?

Penelope (Shailene Woodley), the wife of Leo’s twin brother, Elias (also Richard Madden) suspects foul play, and so she hires Bali to investigate. Numbing his depression with industrial quantities of whisky (seriously, it’s a miracle he has such a good complexion), Bali begins poking around in the case and the family involved, drawing out all the corruption, conniving and cover-ups you’d expect from a mystery such as this. It’s fair to say that screenwriters Roberto Bentivegna and Matt Charman (with the latter rewriting the former) rarely stray far from genre convention.

Gordon-Levitt is great value as Bali, however, and he’s altogether more sensitive and less grizzled than the actors usually cast in gumshoe roles such as this. He’s strikingly younger-looking than, say, Gene Hackman in the classic Night Moves (1975), less cynical than Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye (1973), and less sleazy than Clint Eastwood in Tightrope (1984). Gordon-Levitt has that natural nice-guy aura to him, which means Bali remains a likeable presence even when he’s baldly lying to local cops like Mensah (Babou Ceesay) in order to get the intel he needs to crack his case.

Shailene Woodley’s also watchable as a woman from an ordinary background who’s married into the billionaire Vardakis clan, and it gradually becomes evident that her relationship with her husband and his twin brother is a turbulent one ā€“ not least because Elias has a distinctly ruthless side (something Richard Madden evidently enjoys exploring).

The direction, by Philippe Lacôte, is functional rather than flashy, though the settings themselves do almost as much heavy lifting as the actors. If you didn’t want to go on a package holiday to Crete before, you probably will after watching Killer Heat ā€“ even if it will put you off the idea of free solo climbing as a hobby.

Killer Heat is therefore the epitome of the three-star movie: not a classic, but engrossing. It’s a throwback to a time before the industry’s all-or-nothing approach to filmmaking, when B-movies and moderately-priced mysteries were the expanding foam between the blockbusters released in the summer and winter.

Killer Heat currently has an aggregate score of 19 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes sense if the site’s thought of as a digital reflection of the film industry in the 21st century ā€“ everything’s binary. A film is either good or bad; a $200m extravaganza full of CGI or a $1m film about someone running a market stall.

There’s arguably a place, though, for something in between: not brilliant, but pretty good; not a zero-budget indie, but not a city-wrecking superhero film, either. In recent months, it sounds as though movie studios have realised this, too; in February, Paramount pledged to make more lower-budget films on the scale of the $36m musical adaptation, Mean Girls.

Streaming has done much to disrupt how films are made and watched, and not all of it is positive. If it’s created a new home for perfectly acceptable thrillers like Killer Heat, however, then that’s not a bad thing.

Killer Heat is streaming on Prime Video now.

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