Destroy­er

Nicole Kid­man is an unpre­dictable megawatt tal­ent whose name when attached to a film instant­ly makes it a com­pelling propo­si­tion, espe­cial­ly when her role is the lead, as in Karyn Kusama’s detec­tive noir Destroy­er. Per­haps the kind­est thing to say about Kidman’s per­for­mance as trou­bled LAPD enforcer Erin Bell is that it is a com­mit­ted one.

Kid­man once donned a false nose to play Vir­ginia Woolf in The Hours – the clos­est she of the porce­lain god­dess stature came to doing a Char­l­ize Theron in Mon­ster. This trans­for­ma­tion has now been eclipsed by Destroy­er. Thanks to Bill Corso’s overzeal­ous make-up design, she is aged via bag­gy, sal­low skin which, cou­pled with her deranged per­for­mance and a long black coat, lend her a walk­ing dead vibe.

The film opens on the dis­cov­ery of a dead body in a bleak, LA nowheresville. He is a John Doe (“no ID, no idea,” wise­cracks an offi­cer in what proves to be the film’s high water mark of wit). Three black cir­cles are tat­tooed on the back of his neck. This means some­thing to Bell and she snarls that she knows who did it in a spe­cial gruff voice Kid­man is try­ing for the part. Bell is a train­wreck who drinks too much, sleeps in her car, and par­ents her 16-year-old daugh­ter in a fash­ion which extends to try­ing to punch her boyfriend.

Life didn’t always look so bleak for Detec­tive Erin Bell. Eigh­teen years back, she was a spark­ly-eyed cop, who looked like Kid­man the movie star, and had yet to devel­op the mys­te­ri­ous limp and deep voice of her future self. In the first of many incre­men­tal­ly reveal­ing flash­backs, we see her and hand­some part­ner Chris (Sebas­t­ian Stan) prepar­ing to go under­cov­er in a gang. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that some­thing went so bad­ly wrong on this under­cov­er mis­sion that Bell has nev­er got­ten over it.

The gang leader is Silas (Toby Kebbell), a car­toon vil­lain whose idea of fun is forc­ing an under­ling to play Russ­ian roulette and boom­ing with laugh­ter at the out­come. Back in the present, Bell is search­ing for Silas by doing the rounds on peo­ple from her past, acquir­ing infor­ma­tion through vio­lent means and on one occa­sion giv­ing a hand job to a dying man as ceram­ic owls look on.

The main emo­tion Destroy­er con­jures is bewil­der­ment. It unfolds like a by-the-book crime film pow­ered by broad-strokes char­ac­ters with amoral dis­po­si­tions. Yet it is also besieged by ridicu­lous flour­ish­es pre­sent­ed in a po-faced fash­ion. To whit: Silas wears a wavy black wig, often pho­tographed flut­ter­ing in the breeze, which he throws on a fire for an unspec­i­fied rea­son dur­ing a cli­mac­tic moment; Bell per­suades two offi­cers to rush into a dan­ger­ous fray instead of wait­ing for back up by growl­ing, ​“This is a gun fight”.

The screen­play by Kusama’s reg­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tors, Phil Hay and Matt Man­fre­di, seems to have no aware­ness of its own absur­di­ty, which makes it a depar­ture from their last film togeth­er, 2015’s uncan­ny and absorb­ing cult thriller The Invi­ta­tion.

The frame­work of Destroy­er is too pre­scribed for its stranger aspects to scan as any­thing oth­er than mis­fires. Bradley Whit­ford shows up to bring nasty rel­ish to a crooked lawyer, but else­where the film is like a par­o­dy made with­out the direc­tor being in on the joke. It says some­thing about how half-baked the rest of the film is that Kidman’s sub­lime­ly uncon­vinc­ing por­tray­al of an offi­cer of the law remains its chief charm.