Suicide Kings is a crime thriller/comedy starring Christopher Walken, Denis Leary, Sean Patrick Flanery, Henry Thomas, Jeremy Sisto, Jay Mohr, Nina Siemaszko, Johnny Galecki, and Laura Harris.
Four friends: Avery (Thomas), Max (Flanery), Brett (Mohr), and T.K. (Sisto) kidnap former mob boss Charlie Barrett (Walken) and he wakes up duct-taped to a chair. They inform him that Avery's sister Elise (Harris), who also happens to be Max's fianceé, has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom. Anything that happens to Elise, happens to Charlie, and as the kidnappers have already sent back Elise's severed finger, they've already cut off Charlie's.
After Charlie's initial (completely understandable) freakout, he calls his lawyer Marty (Cliff DeYoung) and his bodyguard and enforcer Lono (Leary) to investigate. Meanwhile, he slowly gets into the guys' heads, getting them to reveal more about themselves and their involvement in all this, while also revealing enough about himself to scare the shit out of them.
Eventually, it comes out that Avery was talked into setting up the kidnapping to clear a debt, but Max and Elise actually upped the ransom to $2 million dollars and were complicit in the whole thing (it's never quite clear whose plan it was to kidnap Charlie; maybe Brett). It ends badly for them.
I like this movie; it's got some fun interplay between the buds, and the scenes in the house show some nice escalation. Lono's journey to find Charlie is likewise pretty cool; Denis Leary gets to be cool and in control and scary, and his scene with the abusive stepdad (Joseph Whipp) is on point ("Sorry about your toaster"). But with that said, it's got a couple of issues.
The biggest single issue is that it so, so badly wants to be Pulp Fiction. Like, the jumping around in perspectives, the conversations about boots between Lono and Mickey (Louis Lombardi), the arguments between the two "kidnappers" (Brad Garrett and Frank Medrano, literally credited as "Heckle and Jeckyll") over TV remotes, and, of course, the flashbacks that minor characters get to have, it all feels like someone watched early Tarantino and said "that's hot, let's do that!" And it almost works, but the thing is that everything in Tarantino's movies has a point, whereas a lot of the bits here just kinda don't.
(Also, I never realized this, but the soundtrack in Tarantino's early movies make a huge difference. There is almost no music at all in Suicide Kings, and only a couple of actual songs, and it makes the movie feel weirdly thin and hollow at times.)
The leads do their best to give their characters some life and personality; Mohr and Sisto manage the best, and honestly I'd watch a whole movie about Sisto's T.K. and his struggles. But like, he's depicted as an addict...and it never goes anywhere. He shoots up but there's no consequence of that, so it's a missed Chekov's Needle opportunity.
Anyway, like I said, I like the movie, but there are better examples of the genre.
My Grade: C+
Rewatch Value: Medium
Next up: The Suicide Squad
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