**/****
starring Chloë Sevigny, Peter Stormare, Clea DuVall, Timothy Hutton
screenplay by Gus Krieger, Ann Peacock
directed by Jonathan Liebesman
by Alex Jackson Jonathan Liebesman's The Killing Room would still have been pretty hokey five years ago, but in 2009, with the election and inauguration of Barack Obama, it's looking nothing short of obsolete. Genre filmmakers are going to have to face the fact that the Bush years are over. One of our new president's very first acts while in office was to shut down Guantanamo Bay; if torture porn wants to survive into the next decade, it's going to have to reinvent itself. In The Killing Room, four strangers are locked in a room together and made to answer a trivia question. The person whose answer is farthest away from the correct one is executed. It's a Machiavellian government experiment designed to aid the United States in the War on Terror. I won't reveal how, but suffice it to say I have serious doubts as to the plan's cost efficiency. Moreover, I cannot conceive of any possible way that the methods used could yield the intended results. Peter Stormare is the evil mastermind behind the curtain. At the beginning of the film, he has taken Chloë Sevigny as his apprentice and is training her by reviewing footage of a previous experiment. Fresh out of grad school, she finds herself struggling to maintain her carefully-cultivated professional demeanour as she discovers her new job requires her to oversee and participate in the murder of innocent people. The scenes between Stormare and Sevigny undermine the entire movie, breaking the tension at key points and artificially inflating the material with pretentious ruminations on how much evil we're willing to commit in the name of the greater good. When we're in the killing room with the test subjects, the film is perfectly effective. The first execution is genuinely startling and the picture's very last line is quite deliciously sick. There's a good sequence involving the subjects smearing blood all over the white walls so they can read the etchings previous occupants may have carved in. But even if The Killing Room stayed within its eponymous location and explained a lot less than it does, it wouldn't register as much more than a well-made Saw clone. This late in the game, we deserve better.
