Thomas Walton’s film “They Turned Us Into Killers” is bewildering on many levels. It explodes with spectacular shoddiness in every department that exists in cobbling a film together. That’s what it resembles: a randomly, grotesquely, and amateurishly patched-together sequence of scenes that perplex in their sheer idiocy and ill-designed slasher whodunnit. Walton’s screenplay rests on a thin premise that has been badly stretched to sustain a medium-length feature that inevitably the cracks show not very long after the whole thing gets off the ground. Or does it really ever get going?
The entire film is ultimately limited to a room, if you can bother to cut past all the tripe about the investigation that does nothing to further the narrative but seems to prop up as a thoughtless additive. A basic driving force of tension and dread is wholly absent in the film, which can put a school skit with its minimal resources to shame. This is one of those films that leaves your brain quizzing on which aspect of it is worse than the other.
The acting is so broad and silly you might wonder if the cast could just as well be on this lousy joke of a film, where the needlessly looping plot can compete with the glaring fake-ness of the bloodbath in delivering a copious dose of unintentional comedy. This is a simple story that occasionally seems aware of its own disposability, especially because the exaggerated expressions of the actors in several scenes come off as forcefully designed to push a sequence way past its particular needs. To make matters worse, sentimental excesses coat all the spurts of vengeful violence.
They Turned Us Into Killers (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis :
The film is essentially about two vigilantes who resort to violence to quench their thirst for retribution. Justice that hadn’t been delivered is wrenched back by the wronged in a bout of grief and stalled healing. Since they haven’t been able to process and resolve their issues pertaining to the immense brutality and unfairness that shattered their lives, the two primary avenging figures wrestle the act of punishment into their control as they dispense what they think the right comeuppance for the beastly sinners who follow no moral code. A lot of this film feels irresponsible, flighty, and insanely reckless in its basic idea and conceit, but perhaps deeper ideological probes aren’t to be made here. You can’t expect to be asking tough, incisive questions in a film that is so luridly slapstick in its brazen stupidity.
The film opens with a bizarrely scattershot, frantic couple of sequences that take a roundabout way in approaching the central space where the revenge is being exacted and punishment doled out. It is like a barn with all sorts of dangerous implements and a special ‘murder bench’ where the evil guy meets his brutal death, overseen by Star (Scout Taylor-Compton) and Zion Miller (Brian Anthony Wilson). The two are bound in their desire for vengeance in ways that leap across generations. The devil is in one family and its progenies across time.
Star is mourning the suicide of her closest friend, Karma (Lauren Francesca). Karma became a junkie under the influence of her boyfriend, BJ (Bryce Draper). She was a girl full of dreams, eager to audition as a vocal hire but her life got turned upside down when she came under the sway of BJ. He got her hooked on various drugs, effectively ruining her life and the pull of ambition. She thought BJ and his two brothers, Zeke (Joe Leone) and Colt (Louie Torrellas), also loved her with the same conviction and selflessness that she loved them. She couldn’t be more deluded, paying the heaviest price for her erroneous belief.
Star and Zion work in collusion and have kidnapped Travis (Brandon Irons), gagging and strapping him on what is his deathbed. A helpless Travis tells them all he did was sell the drug to BJ, which became the reason that destroyed her life. He guides them to BJ and his two brothers. Simultaneously, there’s a parallel track that is a flashback foregrounding Karma’s voice, coming through the letters she wrote to Star.
In that, she relates how she was raped by BJ and all the trust she reposed in him and his brothers were manipulated by them. In a predictable fashion, the film proceeds to show Zion and Star picking up those other culpable men without much trouble and getting them on the murder bench. Meanwhile, Zion pays a visit to his father, who hasn’t healed from the murder of his wife, Louise, on a honeymoon vacation. One of the men behind the murder and rape of his wife was the father of BJ. Zion turns into a masked vigilante and kills off the guy when he finally gets a chance. Star is connected to Zion in that she is the granddaughter of the man who had seen the tragedy happen and couldn’t do anything and killed himself out of guilt.
They Turned Us Into Killers (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
Do BJ and his brothers get spared or killed?
There is also a parallel thread of an investigation into the killings done by Star and Zion, which reveals itself as being the present tense track and the rest in patchy flashbacks. The bodies are dumped in a park. The film doesn’t give us a chance of gauging the intricacies of the procedural but the entire thing is so full of obvious loopholes and insinuating connections the cops wouldn’t have much deduction to make.
There’s also a junkie support group member, Macie (Taryn Manning), who seems to serve the only function of helping the cops draw a link between the unsolved killing of Louise, which happened forty years ago, and the present spate of murders. The film concludes with the ultimate killing of the four men, as they are bludgeoned and also have their wrists slit like a depressed Karma was compelled into. As the cycle of revenge gets completed, we wonder whether Star and Zion will continue the vigilante streak, but we get the implication that both will leave it behind.
