Matthew McConaughey plays a cop named Killer Joe who is really an assassin, and in William Friedkin’s 2011 thriller, that is only the beginning of how far things go wrong. The film, now on Netflix, follows a desperate family that hires Joe to kill Chris’ off-screen mother so they can collect her life insurance, only for the plan to collapse into something darker, meaner, and far more brutal than anyone involved seems ready for.
McConaughey gives what the source calls a career-high performance as Joe Cooper, a smooth, morals-free police detective in a black cowboy hat who moonlights as a killer. Chris, already in debt to a local cocaine dealer, cannot raise the down payment Joe wants, so Joe demands Dottie as payment instead. That bargain sets the film’s rot in motion, with Gina Gershon, Thomas Hayden Church, Emile Hirsch, and Juno Temple all caught inside the same ugly scheme.
Friedkin, who had already made his name with horror films like The Exorcist,, and Bug, adapted Killer Joe from Tracy Letts’ play and directed it as one of the more disturbing, violent, raw-knuckle thrillers a viewer may ever see. The movie does not soften its edges. It builds toward a climactic dinner that goes bad fast, with a gun and a can of pumpkin pie filling turning the scene into something gleefully vicious, before the credits slam into Clarence Carter’s 1986 song Strokin’.
That mix of star power, cruelty, and black comedy is why Killer Joe still lands years later. Friedkin did not make a polished crime thriller or a prestige character piece. He made a pitiless descent that gives McConaughey one of the strangest and most dangerous roles of his career, and the film’s new streaming life on Netflix puts that performance back in front of anyone willing to sit through the whole meal.
