REVIEW: ‘Kill Me If You Dare’ Misses The Target

Polish director Filip Zylber returns to Netflix once again with another rom-com, Kill Me if You Dare (Zabij Mnie, Kochanie) (2024). It’s based on a 2019 Turkish-language film of the same name by director Senol Sönmez and writer Murat Disli. Frequent Polish-language Netflix star and Zylber collaborator Mateusz Banasiuk appears as Piotr, across from Weronika Ksiazkiewicz as Natalia. The couple is celebrating their fifth anniversary, sort of, when they win the lottery big time. Of course, a sudden and dramatic change in circumstances rarely saves a relationship already on the rocks. Piotr is uptight, anxious, and doesn’t want to spend a dime. Natalia just wants to go on vacation and get out of the rut of misery she and Piotr are clearly in.

When the couple finally does go off to the mountains on vacation, they’re followed by Agata (Agnieszka Wiedlocha) and Lucasz (Piotr Rogucki), Natalia and Piotr’s best friends, respectively. Each is trying to convince their friend that the only way out of their misery is to kill their partner and inherit the full sum of their winnings. There’s also a whole subplot about Piotr’s boss being his ex-girlfriend and Natalia being jealous of them. However, it’s mostly inconsequential.

The Polish version of Kill Me if You Dare (2024) takes a slightly more sincere tone than the original. This helps make the characters less insufferable than in the original, but it doesn’t fix its biggest issue: there’s nothing fun about it. A movie about a married couple trying to kill each other to get out of a suffering marriage and inherit a fortune should be funny, sexy, or at least a little charming. Unfortunately, this movie hardly contains any of that.

Banasiuk will always be endearing to me. And on her own, Ksiazkiewicz does well enough. But they don’t have a single ounce of chemistry together. Considering how much I love his work with Adrianna Chlebicka in director Zylber’s Squared Love series, there’s just no connection here. It would almost be nice if they just broke up and moved on rather than put the audience through the paces of an obvious relationship arc. And at least in the 2019 version, the relationship between Agata and Lucasz is exciting.

They’re both hot in the Turkish version. It makes the absurd detour the movie takes following them fun to watch, even if little else about that movie is. But in Kill Me if You Dare (2024), the film depicts Lucasz as an unattractive oaf. Agata’s attraction to him is odd. And they removed all of the casino bits. They’re some of the only parts of the original I even liked. Plus, it at least gave their eventual conclusion a bit of credence. Here, it’s all a little more out of nowhere. The whole final sequence with the four of them, which was so well-choreographed originally, is also cut down to nothing.

With the few good parts chopped out, there’s little left to enjoy. The main characters are at least less annoying than originally, but the ways they try to kill each other just don’t cut it. It’s melodramatic but humorless. And there’s zero spark or sexuality in the whole film. That is if you exclude Lucasz being gross to Piotr’s boss early in the movie. Kill Me if You Dare (2024) is a ridiculous premise in the first place. Without something to keep things exciting, the whole movie just falls flat.

There’s not much else to say about Kill Me if You Dare (2024). It’s just a whole lot of nothing. The best parts of the original, which you can hardly call good in the first place, are cut out from the Polish rendition for inexplicable reasons. And the main stars simply do not click with one another. The idea for the movie is ridiculous, but there’s no personality in this rendition to make the premise pop. Unfortunately, Kill Me if You Dare (2024) is a total miss.

Kill Me if You Dare (2024) is streaming now on Netflix