Based on our last few visits to Greece, the title Killer Heat might refer to the incendiary summer weather alone. But the words actually ride atop a new thriller set on the island of Crete that just started streaming on Prime. Yes, we did say NEW thriller, though its roots and numberless homages reach back to the noir private-eye Hollywood classics of the 1930s.
Of course, noir didn’t end with The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep, with detectives Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. Any movie that tries to be what Killer Heat tries to be must also wrestle with the ghosts of two incredible thrill rides from the 1970s and 1980s – Chinatown and Body Heat. Engaging as it is for scenery and decent storytelling, this new film is no match for those, for Jack Nicholson’s obnoxious but persistent private eye or for Kathleen Turner’s irresistibly voracious femme fatale. So much has changed culturally since the ’70s and ‘80s, almost as much as since the 1930s. So many things in the noir world can’t even be talked about now, even if only to roundly disparage them. So many very dark and dangerous things about human nature have to be covered over by a happy, or at least hopeful, ending.
In the new film directed by Philippe Lacote, based on a short story called “The Jealousy Man” by Scandinavian bestseller Jo Nesbo, Nick Bali is a Greek-American NYPD cop with a problem. His own sadness and anger over his wife’s affair have driven him to leave his job, his wife and his beloved young daughter for the only place on earth things are better – Greece, naturally. He has been living in Athens, doing bits of private investigator work, mostly (here as everywhere) tracking down marital infidelities for jealous spouses. He is called to Crete by a woman whose husband, heir to a Greek shipping fortune, has just died in a rock climbing accident.
The “dame” (sorry, it’s the 1930s again) is a knockout and, while she talks a good game about trust, she can’t be trusted. Nick quickly finds himself working with this Penelope Vardakis, stylishly played by Shailene Woodley, to poke into jealousies and assorted crimes of the Vardakis clan, mostly through visits to their yachts and villas on the beautifully captured Aegean. Richard Madden portrays fiery young, very muscled Elias Vardakis, whose identical twin brother Leonidas was the Vardakis who fell from the rocks. Actually, Madden portrays both brothers.
American actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt holds the story together and moves it along at a brisk pace. When we’re not watching him swill whiskey to drown his own private sorrows, we’re watching him climb to the Orthodox monastery where he’s been stashed by the woman who hired him, or driving his rental car through some of the prettiest scenery along Crete’s northeastern coast. He also supplies a world-weary voiceover direct from the original noir canon, drawing many inferences about his present case from the oh-so-Greek myth of Icarus flying too close to the sun.
Many things happen during the investigation of this death, which naturally sounds less and less like an accident with every new bit of information Bali uncovers. One unexpected delight is Babou Ceesay as island police detective Georges Mensah (really, are there any black Greek police detectives?), who slowly comes to trust Nick and help him, despite the predictable pressures from superiors on the Vardakis pad. The witty Nick-and-Georges stakeout exchange about why it’s “The Gambia” and “The Bronx,” but not “The Brooklyn” is by itself worth watching the entire movie.
For all the effective plot twists and colorful characters, it is interesting to think back to the 1930s noir classics as you watch, as well as to Chinatown and Boby Heat. Think back, one film after the other, to the endings. We now live in a world in which evil has to fit a tight circle of unpopular profiles, and has to show any good people finally rewarded with good things. It’s a bit like letting Hallmark design the Apocalypse. Killer Heat notwithstanding, true noir doesn’t do happy endings.
