The private detective film will always be the slinkiest and sexiest of thriller subgenres – minus the strictures and/or corruption of police procedure, crime-solving can feel as alluringly shadowy and illicit as the crime itself. Relatively few of us have ever encountered, let alone hired, a private eye; far more of us, I’d wager, have at some point entertained the fantasy that we’d be quite good at the job ourselves.
Newly out on Amazon Prime, Philippe Lacôte’s Killer Heat isn’t exactly a classic entry in the PI canon. Based on a Jo Nesbø short story and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a moody detective investigating a sordid love triangle involving twin brothers (Richard Madden and Richard Madden) against attractive Greek island scenery, it’s diverting if not especially memorable, but it does offer the viewers the requisite pleasures of participatory sleuthing. Shaggy-haired and summer-suited, Gordon-Levitt trades in the classic detective fedora for a jauntier panama hat – somehow still giving off, even in his mid-forties, the boyish air he brought nearly 20 years ago to Brick, Rian Johnson’s rather more inspired contemporary answer to the private-eye noir, in which a suburban high-school student channels the likes of Sam Spade in probing an ex-girlfriend’s disappearance.
