W hat might seem like a relatively easy ask on paper – the director of a buzzy festival hit adapting a Jo Nesbø short story with three likable and attractive actors set on the camera-ready island of Crete – has become a bizarrely effortful slog in the misshape of Killer Heat, a dull and predictable sunshine noir that wastes the time of those involved as well as ours. Originally known as the far more appealing The Jealousy Man in print, the anonymously retitled mystery plays less like a real movie and more like a case-of-the-week episode of an ITV crime drama (without credits it’s not even 90 minutes long). Joseph Gordon-Levitt , revisiting similar yet considerably lesser territory to his role in Rian Johnson’s stylish 2005 thriller Brick, plays a run-of-the-mill private detective named Nick who is called to investigate a seemingly cut-and-dried death on a Greek island.
Leo (Richard Madden) has fallen off a steep mountain edge while free-climbing, a reckless accident to most but to his sister-in-law Penelope (Gordon-Levitt’s Snowden co-star Shailene Woodley), it looks like murder. She’s married to his identical twin brother and at the mercy of his wealthy, and dangerous, family. Nick’s by-the-numbers investigation then begins, aided by some really rather heinous, at times parody-level, voiceover (“Sometimes you use a carrot, sometimes you use a stick, sometimes you just lie your ass off”) as flashbacks to his past as a jealous husband, to a cruelly underused.
