david-sarkies This film has a lot of Tarintino influence in it, especially as he helped director Roger Avary make it. Like From Dusk Til Dawn, Killing Zoe spends the first half of the movie setting the scene and the rest of the movie with the action. Killing Zoe is a low budget film made in Los Angeles with a few Parisian shots. This is also Avary's first movie and I think he has some talent.Zed (Eric Stolz) has been invited to Paris by an old friend, Eric (Jean-Hughes Anglade) to crack a safe in a bank. Zed is a professional, and we see this as he sets to work opening a safe, yet he is a quiet humble man who prefers to make love than to kill. He is also a man who is easily manipulated and Eric does this quite regularly in the movie. We see Zed being forced into taking drugs and having women dragged away from him because Eric doesn't particularly like them. He is also taken of a tour through a very dark side of Paris where we see drugs, sleazy women, and men screwing like animal (I use such terminology because it is only for the selfish desire of pleasure). The next day, Bastille Day, he then must participate in a daring bank robbery. Daring because everybody is hung over, or still on drugs; it is a high security bank; and it seems very little planning has gone into it.Eric is not the typical Hollywood robber. He kills at a whim and has no preferences to who he will kill. He murders a woman and a man and lets another man go free. In fact Eric seems to have a thing against women as he brutally throws Zoe (Julie Delpy) out of the room when he first meets Zed and throws another whore across the room when she tries to seduce Zed (even though he cannot understand her). He kills people on a whim and represents the worst that humanity can offer.Zoe is another character who begins as a prostitute yet does not want to think of herself as one. She needs to money to get through school and just considers the job as a little thing on the side. Yet she knows what she is, and even though she considers herself beautiful and refined, everybody else treats her as a whore. The reality of what she does hits home when she listens to three men tell a joke about a whore.Killing Zoe is a reasonable movie and good for a low budget production. Much of the movie was spoken in French which is supposed to reflect the fact that it was in France, but this didn't irritate me as it did in Stargate when everybody spoke ancient Egyptian. Still it is a good movie and worth a watch if you can handle drugs and brutal violence.

Jamie_Seaton with this film being directed by Roger Avery and Quentin Tarantino doing the screenplay i was sure this was going to be a gem. i was wrong. i don't hate this film but in no ways do i like it.i love Roger Avery because of his amazing direction in rules of attraction and his screenplays to pulp fiction and silent hill but he made a mistake making this. do i really need to comment on Tarantino, we all know hes a genius.this movie is just set around a gang robbing a bank but fails due to silly people participating in the robberyi'm disappointed in Tarantino and Avery for doing this film but doesn't change my mind on how amazing they both are. everyone makes mistakes......... 3/10...........j.d Seaton

kshitij (axile007) Killing Zoe revolves around Zed who was invited to Paris to contribute in a bank robbery.Unfortunately that's all the story plot contains. Rest is all about unnecessary violence which really don't make any sense.There's been also some scenes of drugs depiction and consumption.Also there is no twist in storyline,weak plot and very predictable.The only strong link of the movie is the presence of Julie Delphy who looked extremely charming.Its obvious to expect more from this movie but it do not stands anywhere around its expectations.

johnnyboyz There is an energy behind Killing Zoe, there is a passion and a commitment from its director behind Killing Zoe and that is to make a fast, furious and bloody film that entertains as well as shocks in equal measure. Given the situation regarding this film's production, the film comes across upon reading the pre-production stage as a bit of an accident. Whilst scouting for locations for Reservoir Dogs, director Roger Avary would discover a place where a 'perfect' heist film could take place. Since the whole gimmick (in the nicest possible way) for Reservoir Dogs is that it's a heist film without the heist, the bank couldn't really be used but it suited Avary's other script he had going and that was Killing Zoe.An interesting back-story to a film that is never anything but interesting, apart from perhaps being entertaining at certain points. For Reservoir Dogs to take a mere two years before it itself would become a victim of a pastiche is testament to Reservoir Dog's influential power as well as Avary's own passion and drive behind this production. Notice how the script supposedly took a week to write, also.The film revolves predominantly around a heist going on in a French bank in which master safecracker Zed (Stoltz) is working with an old French buddy who also just happens to be a heroin addict and a psychopathic criminal, amongst other things. He is Eric (Anglade) and is played with ruthless efficiency by the respective French actor. But Killing Zoe is not another routine heist film. Killing Zoe spells out all the tiny, painstaking details that go with robbing a bank and it utilises the conventional 'race against time' drive. Amongst other things, the guys will have to go through each hostage one by one in order to get codes, they will have to pass the time in the main office while other robbers work downstairs on the vault and they will have to deal with any security guards they might miss once entering new bank owned territory.But that's the joy of Killing Zoe. Once it all gets up and running, there is no going back. It is a roller-coaster of violence, disturbance and dark, dark humour that isn't over until it's over. The film is all about stealing and mugging. Zed is the perfect 'fish out of water': an American in Paris; an American in France; an American in Europe. One of the first scenes of the film has a porter stand there and accept a tip that is probably too much; Zed is being 'robbed'. Then there is Zoe (Delpy) herself who charges a thousand Francs for sex but maintains she is no prostitute. "In that case, can I have my money back?" wise-cracks Zed but if you go by her convincing analysis of what she is, she is right and thus has got herself some money not through stealing but in a slimy working way. Similar to the porter who gets extra cash bringing up bags and Zoe acting as a prostitute for money, Zed and his group of cronies are breaking into banks; breaking into vaults and trying to steal the cash that they probably all think they earn by doing this. With this reading, the film is about greed.Then there are the influences of other work made by Tarantino and Avary round about the time. The sex scene between Zed and Zoe is inter-cut with images from the Nosferatu film echoing the technique used in Natural Born Killers; a film Tarantino wrote but disowned. There is also the establishment of a genuine love affair between a male lead and a prostitute echoing True Romance of the previous year, another Tarantino penned film. So if Zed is established as this lost soul as an American in France, it is because he is mugged out of a thousand Francs from a girl who isn't selling herself; he is never given the time in plain English and is informed by Eric about how wrong foreign people are when it comes to French iconography and tourism. But when push comes to shove and he is placed in his 'zone', Zed performs. This is first followed through when he looks at a map of the bank and comes up with an alternate plan that will save them time as well as possible trouble – he has solved the robbers a problem.Killing Zoe is a film that although is American, does not conform to European stereotypes just archetypes the genre demands. The French are not buffoons, the Englishman played by Gary Kemp is not a total idiot and if anything they are all a match for one another with the Zed, the American, himself sticking out for ridicule thanks to the evidence mentioned in the previous paragraph. Eric is a psychotic criminal into hard drugs and homicide, he would also rather blow someone up than shoot them in the vault. The film is one that does not start off with typical French iconography of whatever you like but stays a ground level, literally. The fast moving cars and sense of travelling kicks the film off perfectly and with a good guy to root for, a love story cleverly thrown in and an awesome bad guy, it is no surprise the film maintains that air of near perfection throughout.