The attention-grabbing beginning of this movie finds two scam artists, having accidentally killed a victim, stumbling on the possibility of blackmailing a football star, and setting in motion a quirky road movie with hints of black humour.

I have to say, this sketchy synopsis recalls the type of plotline the Coen brothers might use. This is slightly misleading - the film is darker, less gimmicky and ultimately less fun than standard Coen brothers fare - but nonetheless the film does share several of the brothers' failings - noticeably an inability to create a consistent tone or convincing psychologies for the lead characters. We know the most important character suffered severe trauma as a child, yet we learn little about her other than that, and her boyfriend seems an even bigger mystery.

Also, to illustrate the problems the film has with tone, the film has noirish themes, but has incongruously bright sunny photography. It also contains one brilliantly funny sequence, in which a cop finds he knows his partner less well than he thought, but frankly this scene looks like it comes from another movie.

However, the film is always watchable. It does look attractive, even if its main stylistic tic - continual jump cuts, presumably in homage to Godard - does jar after a while. Moreover, a brash, confident central performance from Frances O'Connor definitely holds the attention, and I did feel that I cared for her basically hard-to-like character.

Although the film is only a partial success, it still looks like the type of film that could develop a cult following.

Any film that is prefaced with an extract from a Dylan Thomas poem deserves some praise and this film doesn't disappoint in most departments. This is essentially a film for students of film because it plays with so many cinematic conventions and mixes seemingly irreconcilable genres. Kiss or Kill is both film noir and a road movie, playing both genres against each other with the aid of Godardian jump-cuts to heighten the uneasiness and underlying menace the film evokes so well. In this sense, the film is visually audacious and technically brilliant and that's thanks to the direction which is on-target most of the time. My only gripe was the inclusion of some dubious story lines that detracted from the film's overall uneasy effect. Thankfully the acting of both leads compensates such flaws. Worth watching with a Film Theory book in one hand and popcorn in the other.

Interesting murder/love story, set in the Australian outback. Way out in the outback. A road picture in which a reckless young couple are pursued by both the police and a gangster who wants something they've taken from him.

Simple enough so far. The problem is that the couple seem to be ahead of the people tracking them, yet from time to time, as they stop at some crummy motel for the night, or stay at a friendly couple's house, a dead body or two turns up the next morning. So who's doing whom around here? The young lady (O'Connor) has a habit of sleepwalking and doing things at night that she is unable to remember. But Al (Day) is doing things too -- robbing their acquaintances, for instance -- and trying to keep these secret acts from her.

The ending, which renders the concept of implausibility corporate, winds up with both the young folks innocent of any serious crime, and they live happily ever after.

Despite the fact that people get burned to death, raped, and have their throats cut, it's overall a pretty good-natured movie with little gore or horror. Actually, there is some humor, mostly involving the pair of obscene detectives who are tracking the suspects.

At one point the cops are forced by their responsibility to watch a tape which has recorded the goings on in a motel room, searching for an image of O'Connor. In one episode on the tape a middle-aged man slips into bed with a blond young boy. ("Eh, this ******'s sick.") Farther on, a dark girl strips and begins servicing her customer. One cop says that it looks like O'Connor. The older cop stops the tape, peers at the screen, and says, no, that's not her. That's Felicity. The first cop thinks for a moment and asks, "'Ow do you know air nime is Felicity"? "Because she 'as no teeth," answers the other. They both nod and start the tape again. There are several such incidents, all the more funny because neither of them laughs. They're given the best lines, no doubt about it. "Well, this isn't the end of the world but you can see it from here." I don't know exactly why the film is edited in such a way that many cuts have a few frames missing. I guess it saves time and adds some zip to what is already a pretty fast-moving story. I didn't find it as distracting as it might sound. Never any sense of the director's hollering, "Hey, Mom, I got a CAMERA!" Australians are generally a lot of fun. I like the guys especially. They're heavily into sports, beer drinking, jokes, bonding and a lot of other masculine stuff -- without a touch of narcissism or meanness. I like them because they demonstrate that manliness doesn't necessarily take the form of John Wayne. They haven't painted themselves into a corner by adopting too narrow a definition of gender identity. Hard to believe that Greek warriors would write poetry in the evening and rush into combat mano a mano the next day.