Clay Pigeons – I still don’t know what this is

I’ve now seen ‘Clay Pigeons’ three times and yet I’m still not totally sure how best to describe it, or know what exactly I’ve even watched!  However, at least I must like it... whatever it is.

It’s a story which doesn’t really fit easily into any particular genre.  It’s not really thrilling enough to be a thriller.  It doesn’t have any element of a ‘who-dun-it’ as every death is pretty much self explanatory and there’s certainly no action in it.  Perhaps the best category – if this IS even a category – is ‘serial killer’ film... as there are plenty of bodies piling up here and there.

It’s about a man – Clay, played by Joaquin Phoenix – who just seems to attract death and destruction all around him.  He can’t seem to go a day in his small American town without someone he knows getting killed – normally horribly.  And this trend is set to get worse when he meets Lester, played by (a slim) Vince Vaughn, who also seems to just want to kill pretty much everyone in his way.  

What follows isn’t your average story.  There are no ‘damsels in distress’ who conveniently need to be rescued in the final act.  And, talking of final acts, there isn’t the traditional stand-off between hero and villain in some dramatic place, like the top of a high-rise building.  Perhaps that’s why the film has such an odd feel to it.  It doesn’t really conform to any sort of blueprint.  You just follow the lives of these – murderous – characters and see where it takes you.  

If you like the sound of that, you should get something out of this film.  It has the feel of a film-maker’s early work where he’s still allowed enough freedom not to conform to every Hollywood convention.  However, a word of caution, if you’re looking for ‘relatable’ characters then you probably won’t find any here.  All of them, even Clay, are hardly the sort of people you’d want to hang around with.  But then that’s why you probably won’t mind seeing them bumped off one by one.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that