Kill Me Again (1989)

★ 6.1 1h 34m 129 votes IMDb

Action Drama Thriller Crime

After Faye and her psychotic boyfriend, Vince, successfully rob a mob courier, Faye decides to abscond with the loot. She heads to Reno, where she hires feckless private investigator Jack Andrews to help fake her death. He pulls the scheme off and sets up Faye with a new identity, only to have her skip out on him without paying. Jack follows her to Vegas and learns he's not the only one after her. Vince has discovered that she's still alive.

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Cast

Val Kilmer as Jack Andrews Died 2025 · Los Angeles, California, USA Val Edward Kilmer (December 31, 1959 – April 1, 2025) was an American actor. Originally a stage actor, Kilmer became popular in the mid-1980s after a string of appearances in comedy films, starting wi...

Joanne Whalley as Fay Forrester Age 64 · Salford, Manchester, England, UK Joanne Whalley (born 25 August 1961) is an English actress who began her career in 1974. She has since amassed numerous credits, primarily on television, but also in nearly 30 feature films, including...

Michael Madsen as Vince Miller Died 2025 · Chicago, Illinois, USA Michael Madsen (September 25, 1957 – July 3, 2025) was an American actor, poet, and photographer. He starred in central roles in such films as Reservoir Dogs, Free Willy, Donnie Brasco, and Kill Bill,...

Jon Gries as Alan Swayzie Age 68 · Glendale, California, USA An American actor, writer and director. He is known for his role in Napoleon Dynamite as Uncle Rico, and more recently "Lost" as Roger Linus, "Taken" as Casey, and "The Pretender" as Broots. From ear...

Michael Greene as Lt. Hendrix Died 2020 · San Francisco, California, USA From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Michael Greene (born November 4, 1933 in San Francisco, California) was an actor active from the 1960s through the 1990s. Early in his career, Greene was frequ...

Director John Dahl

Cast Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley, Michael Madsen, Jon Gries, Michael Greene, Bibi Besch, Joseph Carberry, Pat Mulligan, Nick Dimitri, Robert Schuch

John Chard 6/10 Mar 17, 2019

The first of John Dahl's neo-noir forrays.

Kill Me Again is directed by John Dahl and Dahl co-writes the screenplay with David W. Warfield. It stars Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley, Michael Madsen, Pat Mulligan and Nick Dimitri. Music is by William Olvis and cinematography by Jacques Steyn.

Detective Jack Andrews (Kilmer) becomes involved with a beautiful woman on the run from the mob and her psychopath boyfriend.

John Dahl loves film noir, we know that now after all these years. He would direct the superb Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, two bona fide greats from the neo-noir splinter of film making. Kill Me Again (classic film noir title right there) is his fist directorial feature film venture, it is like a lot of debuts from directors who have a kink for a certain genre or style of film making, in that it only hints at better things to come.

Unfortunately, in spite of being solid enough within the noir parameters, it's all a bit too derivative for its own good. Standard noir tropes are adhered to, male protag led into the murk by a femme fatale, a bruising psycho, some twists and turns, and some stylistics via camera and photographic lenses. Plot relies on the salty machinations of Whalley's femme for its intrigue, and for the most part her character is the dominating factor, but later on the film sort of bypasses her character and it begins to sag as Kilmer's weary P.I. plods onwards.

Fans of the actors do have interest value (though Kilmer is a little miscast and a world away from great neo-noir films he would later do; Heat, The Salton Sea, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), but really the performances are neither good or bad - though Madsen holds court every scene he is in. Although the screenplay and script are merely serviceable as pot boilers, there's just enough here to keep you watching till the culmination of proceedings.

Fans of noir can grab enough from the pic to warrant time investment, but it doesn't linger long afterwards. While casual film fans are warned to use this only as a time filling exercise. 6/10