Essential Killing (2010)
Average Rating: 6.2/10
Reviews Counted: 34
Fresh: 29 | Rotten: 5
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 7.5/10
Critic Reviews: 5
Fresh: 5 | Rotten: 0
No consensus yet.
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Average Rating: 3/5
User Ratings: 2,426
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Movie Info
A soldier must fight for his own survival as well as the cause of his people in this powerful drama from acclaimed Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski. A pair of American security operatives (Zach Cohen and Iftach Ofir) are on patrol in Afghanistan when they stumble upon a Taliban fighter (Vincent Gallo), who kills them despite his terror and nervousness. While trying to escape, the Afghan is captured by American forces; he's tortured during interrogation, but doesn't tell the Americans anything,
Jan 24, 2012
HanWay Films
- Official Site
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All Critics (35) | Top Critics (5) | Fresh (30) | Rotten (5) | DVD (7)
Under the guise of current events, Skolimowski artfully conjures an elemental archetype of human life itself. In English, Polish, and Arabic.
Top CriticStripped of its political vestments, Essential Killing is a chase film almost existential in its rawness and virtually silent in its unfolding -- just a pursued man reduced by circumstance to a primitive state.
View it as an existential thriller illustrating how violence begets violence.
Delivering an absolute minimum of context, the film dares us to forge our own reasons for rooting for or despising this savage.
The movie deftly shifts from its initial chase thriller mode to a grueling, offbeat tale of human survival.
Skolimowski's fresh approach keeps us on guard.
Stark and stripped-down, Jerzy Skolomowski's Essential Killing is a fatalistic fable eschewing the political in favor of the existential, now available in a fittingly barebones DVD package from New Video.
What is striking about it, of course, is the way that the filmmaker manages to garner sympathy for an essential villain.
An astonishingly dull piece of work...
Gallo's humanity is reduced to its naked essence
On its surface, "Essential Killing" is a chase and survival thriller, but through his protagonist's actions, first in war, then for survival, and ultimately through his ironic ending, Skolimowski couldn't be clearer in his political intent.
...a unique film in concept and execution. Brief moments of action are interspersed with Mohammed's struggle to survive the elements, hunger and a pursuing enemy.
Although in terms of its core elements, Essential Killing feels as familiar as any standard Hollywood chase movie, from the Bourne and Rambo series to The Fugitive, Skolimowski ensures this is a wholly different kind of experience.
Whatever narrative shortcomings the picture might have, as a parable of these days it is certainly serviceable, though a bit too ambivalent for comfort. Visually, however, it is never less than stunning.
Gallo does his best acting work since appearing in his own directorial debut Buffalo 66 13 years ago.
Essential Killing would be much less powerful if it didn't show the jihadi's physical sufferings with such visceral immediacy, and if the realism weren't strong enough to deliver surrealist shocks like the staggering final image.
Essential Killing is something of a comeback, if a relatively minor one.
An arresting snow-bound oddity concerning a character you can't care for and yet feel compelled to watch.
The film's nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. Gallo starts as an extremist nutjob, killing for his beliefs - but turns into a hungry maniac, killing to stay on the run. Does the film draw a fascinating comparison between the two? No.
The minimalism feels a bit affected, but as a near-abstract rumination on war and survival, it has a certain stark potency.
An abstract chase movie inspired by the war on terror, it starts well but fades into irrelevance.
It could almost have been made as a silent movie, which is a credit both to Gallo's performance and Skolimowski's pared-down storytelling.
The stark, propulsive filmmaking and Gallo's impressively committed performance must be judged against the evasiveness of its maker's motivations.
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Foreign Titles
- Asesinato esencial (ES)
