Winter Kills

Directed by William Richert, Winter Kills follows Jeff Bridges’ Nick Kegan as he launches an investigation into the assassination of his brother. It’s promising subject matter that’s slowly-but-surely squandered by Richert, as the filmmaker, armed with his own script, delivers a wildly inconsistent mess that abandons its thriller-like opening stretch in favor of something distressingly (and disappointingly) off-the-wall – with the progressively unwatchable atmosphere compounded by a recurring emphasis on scenes and sequences of an aggressively pointless nature. The movie, which essentially lurches from one ill-conceived set-piece to the next (and boasts, at its core, a thoroughly uninteresting investigation and mystery), receives little assistance from its assortment of gratingly over-the-top performers, and it’s clear, too, that the complete and total lack of laughs only exacerbates the pervadingly lackluster atmosphere – with the end result an often astonishingly misguided bomb that just doesn’t work in the slightest.

* out of ****