Review: Nicole Kidman's gritty transformation fuels twisty noir thriller 'Destroyer'
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In “Destroyer,” Nicole Kidman wears a face only a pulp-fiction fan – or Dashiell Hammett – could love.
With skeletal, strung-out features, the weathered eyes of a woman who’s definitely seen some stuff, and leathery skin that hasn’t felt a moisturizer in eons, Kidman gets one seriously hard-boiled makeover and is the best thing about the grimy, twisty crime thriller (★★★ out of four; rated R; in theaters Christmas Day in New York and Los Angeles, opens nationwide Jan. 25). While its narrative is unnecessarily complex and its story influences obvious, director Karyn Kusama (“The Invitation”) is mostly successful juggling a noir style, shifty denizens and shadowy dealings under L.A.’s bright sun.
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LAPD detective Erin Bell (Kidman) enters the scene of a homicide moving like the walking dead, and she’s more of a nuisance than a help to her fellow cops. (She also drinks a lot, doesn't sleep, and is kind of a walking catastrophe.) The city’s latest murder features a dye-covered $100 bill and a body with a familiar tattoo, both of which mean the return of an old foe named Silas (Toby Kebbell) and memories of a heist gone tragically wrong 17 years earlier.
Flashbacks gradually reveal how Erin and her FBI partner Chris (Sebastian Stan) infiltrated Silas’ bank-robbing gang, an assignment that brought Erin and Chris together romantically but remains a source of tremendous guilt for the antiheroine. It’s that accountability Erin struggles with now as she pays visits to former criminal associates and assorted shady types, from a corrupt lawyer (Bradley Whitford) to a rich-girl drug addict (Tatiana Maslany), in order to shake loose information that will lead her to Silas.
Kusama juggles both timelines well and gives each its own vibe: The past story tells how the law-enforcement agents' own morals come into question as they go deeper into a criminal life, though it’s Erin’s present day that’s most intriguing as we watch everything around her fall apart.
That stark contrast comes through in Kidman’s performance, a transformative thing of beauty that keeps the procedural aspects from feeling too familiar. She has a harrowing existence as a hard-living, raspy detective – there’s no “good cop” to her routine, only “bad cop” – and is pretty much a disaster in her home life, too. Teenage daughter Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn) rebels against Mom by cozying up to a sleazy boyfriend (Beau Knapp), yet another aspect chipping away at her frazzled state.
Stan is a Marvel action-movie favorite but again proves his versatility with a solid follow-up to his turn last year in "I, Tonya.” Whitford is enjoyably smarmy, Kebbell strikes a mysterious chord as an enigmatic gang leader akin to Patrick Swayze in “Point Break” (though more cruel than zen), and Maslany, of “Orphan Black” fame, imbues the film with desperate, primal energy.
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Like the heist film “Widows,” “Destroyer” tries to shake up a genre staple, though with mixed results. The tropes mostly work, but a third-act narrative swerve just ends up complicating matters more than anything.
Kidman is the main draw here. In a modern noir about people unable to escape the darkness of their past, she's scary good as a tortured woman desperate for redemption yet too often finding herself on a path of destruction.