Kill Craft (2024) immediately throws the audience into action as it follows hitman Thomas Delon (Michael Paré) right as it gets hot and heavy on one of his sniper missions. Thomas has the advantage as a professional killer, and he's locked and loaded. As the bullets start flying (with some gnarly blood and gore), he initially has the advantage, but in the fray, he ends up taking a bullet to the leg. Luckily, he escapes with his life and is able to return to his family, banged up but still alive.
At home, he has a sixteen-year-old daughter named Marina (Sanae Loutsis), who cares for his disabled wife, Ruth (Amy DiLorenzo). Unfortunately, Thomas' line of work makes him an absentee husband, which has led to him becoming estranged and has made Ruth bitter towards him. Marina and her father have a closer relationship, and she has a softer side, tending a pet cemetery of sorts with her best friend Freya (Isis Eggleston). When Thomas is killed on a job not only does Marina have to hide his death from her mother, she has to finish all of his pending jobs in order to pay the bills and for her mother's medication. As the film title implies, she has to pick up her father's craft of killing--and fast.
One of director Mark Savage's signatures is the ability to mix dry humor and surreal elements into a basic premise. On the surface, Kill Craft is in the tradition of films like The Professional (1994) and Kite (1998), in which a young teenage girl is swept into becoming an assassin and, in the process, loses their innocence. Savage decorates the peripheral of the storyline with colorful characters and bizarre set pieces. One such character is Poe, played by Bill Oberst Jr., who was last seen in Savage's 2017 film Painkiller. Poe is a minion who works for a local crime boss, and is only seen in a dirty brown suit and has an aversion to showering, prompting the boss to only have meetings with him while submerged in a swimming pool. Bill's performance is deliciously overdone and eccentric, and he is a great antagonist. He also hangs out with a contortionist woman who is constantly twisting herself into impossible configurations, who pops in during the final shootout spider-walking like that scary ass deleted scene in The Exorcist (1973) (you know the one, where Regan walks backward down the stairs).
Michael Paré's performance establishes a more serious and grounded tone for the movie's first half before it starts to transition to dry comedy and even a bit of horror in the third act. The pacing does feel slightly rushed after Marina starts to take on the hitman role. It would have been interesting to see her arc more fleshed out and explore her feelings about killing people, especially since she has a lot of empathy toward animals and respects their deaths as much as their lives. Her relationship with her mother is resolved rather quickly as well and the story ends on an anticlimactic note.
Kill Craft is an entertaining throwback to the plethora of direct-to-video action films that lined the shelves of video stores back in the '90s.
--Michelle Kisner