Destroyer is an LA noir starring Nicole Kidman ‘as you have never seen her before’. Her hair is terrible. Her eyes are red-rimmed with dark circles. Her lips are dry, flaking. Her skin is sun-damaged and liver-spotted. Her walk is a leaden shuffle. Just me on a regular day, in other words, but she is being hailed as ‘brave’, of course. This may or may not be so — I can only say that I went to the corner shop just now and Ahmet did not applaud me for leaving the house looking as I do or offer me an Oscar — but it is distracting. I don’t know what absorbed more of my attention, the story, her character, or just how bad she looks. Actually, I can answer that. How bad she looks.
She plays Erin Bell, an LAPD detective who we know is a wreck from the first shot, which shows her waking up in her car beneath a grimy underpass and opening those bleary, red-rimmed eyes. She attends a homicide, approaching the corpse with her leaden, hungover shuffle. (She also has a booze habit.) It’s clear she is not wanted round here. Her fellow cops tell her to go away, sleep it off, leave it to them. But she can’t because, as we will discover, Erin knows the dead body is a message from her past — and not just any old past, as it’s a past she must put right.
Erin had been embroiled in an armed-robbery gang 17 years earlier while working undercover for the FBI. Bit by bit, flashbacks fill in what happened, what went wrong, why she is as she is today — what was the trauma? — and why she seeks vengeance so single-mindedly.
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