The movie centers on British schoolboy Mark as he descends into the dangerous world of the Internet to plot revenge for the murder of his online friend and subsequently attracts the attention of a female MI5 agent, who convinces him to commit homicide.
Andrew Douglas, who directed the 2005 "The Amityville Horror" remake, mishandles the standard noir as straightforward drama and gives it an unfortunate after-school-special vibe.
Provocative, though it never builds to astonishing peaks of illness. Instead, it remains somewhat faithful to the crime, which is just crazy enough to keep the feature intriguing.
If Spike Jonze's Her seeks to destigmatize and legitimize the existence of online relationships, Douglas's U Want Me 2 Kill Him? seeks to do the opposite.
It's effective, in its way, and the acting is excellent, across the board. But "U Want Me 2 Kill Him" side-steps the real fascination with the story, its real guts, which is: Why?
The bad news is that uwantme2killhim? is less engaging than the 2005 Vanity Fair article on which it's based. After the bizarre and sadly sordid details of the real-life story are smoothed away, what's left feels both familiar and simplistic.
A slick, taut, reality-based little cyber-thriller that may be a mite dated in technological terms but still fascinates because of its sheer luridness.
Walden's structurally elaborate script can't quite conjure the social and environmental detail necessary to make the belief-defying believable on a dramatic level.
[Director Andrew Douglas] is only partially successful at depicting its many twists and turns in convincing fashion. But it's compelling nonetheless, if only for the sheer bizarreness of the events depicted.
