Kill Me Three Times
Simon Pegg's contract killer Charlie is the spider at the center of a twisted, violent web; Alice Braga plays Alice, the woman who is the target of two separate and unrelated murder plots that get tangled together in a dark comedy that would make a bucket of scorpions look like a tea party.
Not only is Alice's jealous husband, Jack (Callan Mulvey) out to have her killed for sleeping with local hottie Dylan (Luke Hemsworth), but a deep-in-debt-to-the-wrong-sort-of-people dentist named Nathan (Sullivan Stapleton) and his cold-blooded wife Lucy (Teresa Palmer) have also cooked up a plot that entails her demise. Everyone has different goals; the fact that Alice's death is what they believe will serve those goals is more or less a matter of coincidence.
Complicating the plot are the blackmailing machinations of a corrupt local cop named Bruce (Bryan Brown) and Charlie's own ebullient, but pitiless, attitude toward his business.
"Kill Me Three Times" is written by James McFarland, whose plotting is faultless even though the particulars of incident and characterization stray, from time to time, into the cartoonish. Kriv Stenders directs the action, and the lively cast, with brio. As far as thrillers from the Austalian outback go, this is a much livelier, and more entertaining, movie than last year's Coen Brothers-esque misfire, "Swerve."