What does "strong female character" mean? It's a question that nags with increasing urgency during the duration of Karyn Kusama's dirge of an LA noir, "Destroyer," in which the idea is destroyed in every imaginable way. Nicole Kidman's tough, washed-up detective Erin Bell drinks too much, sleeps in her car and is plagued by survivor's remorse over a undercover job gone wrong 15 years ago. She's lived hard and life's been hard on her, which is conveyed through the absolutely ostentatious makeup that makes her look like a Halloween skeleton, or a corpse on "Law & Order." But mostly, the makeup _ stained prosthetic teeth and all _ doesn't serve any discernible narrative purpose other than for men to tell Erin she looks terrible. Is this a "strong female character"?
The exceptionally talented Kusama struck gold in 2015 with the creepy LA cult thriller "The Invitation," with a script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi. Hay and Manfredi have written the script for "Destroyer" as well, to woefully diminished returns. What happened? Some extremely misguided ideas about how to make the ethereal Kidman a tough and grizzled cop, and a story on the road to nowhere.
The only interesting part of "Destroyer" exists in flashback, during the undercover operation wherein Erin and Chris (Sebastian Stan) infiltrate a desert crime gang planning a bank robbery. The two cops fall in love along the way. Kidman is electrifying as the metal chick girlfriend, while Stan is a breath of fresh air in the stagnant detective drama. Toby Kebbell brings a frisson of tension as the sociopathic gang leader Silas. Unfortunately, we keep returning to the present, where Erin _ a bad cop, even worse mother and ramshackle dumpster fire of a human being _ attempts to track down Silas through all her old comrades, who are seriously scared of her.
"Destroyer" feels like David Lynch directing a Michael Mann film, which is to say it's both not as entertaining as a Mann film and not as surreally intoxicating as a Lynch film. It rests in an uncomfortable liminal space, never finding a groove. The script doesn't know where to place its attention and suffers from the hackneyed pretense that for women to be bravely "unlikable," they have to be ghoulishly ugly, drunk, bad mothers, and constantly degraded. Come on, Pacino and De Niro were allowed to be hot in "Heat."
Present-day Erin, tough, hard and crushed under the bootheel of life, is barely human. She's damaged goods with boundary issues, her motivations woefully obscured, her actions reckless. She slaps her daughter's boyfriend in a club and performs a crude sex act for information on Silas. She beats up and kidnaps a female bank robber (Tatiana Maslany). She destroys herself and everything around her, as if paying penance for her long-ago transgressions. It's not empowering. It's degrading.
Kusama is a good director. She pulls off some impressive set pieces and achieves an appropriately gritty mood. But there are also moments where you have to wonder, "Why am I looking at this?" Random visual details are torturously agonized over _ stray dogs and skateboarders arcing through the Los Angeles sunshine in slow-motion for seemingly no reason at all. The sun shines into Erin's blue eyes, illuminates her dusty skin and graying teeth. All that destruction, and for what?
