At Sundance, a controversial Texas thriller

In the absence of any great movies, Sundance has at least served up a little bit of controversy.

Following Sunday night’s world premiere of Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me -- a Texas-set film noir, based on the Jim Thompson novel -- one audience member was reportedly so outraged by the film’s violence that she openly insulted the director at the post-screening Q&A.

Full disclosure: I wasn’t there for the Q&A. In fact, I bolted after about an hour of this plodding, confusing and indeed sadistically violent movie. I found Casey Affleck, playing a soft-spoken west Texas sheriff who turns out to be a sociopathic murderer, to be wildly miscast.

I found Winterbottom’s direction to be infuriatingly lazy; one fifteen minute stretch of the film takes place in what’s supposed to be Fort Worth in the 1950s -- though it looks nothing like Cowtown then or now. (The film was actually shot in Oklahoma and New Mexico, but couldn’t they at least have sent a researcher to Fort Worth to see what it’s supposed to look like.)

Mostly, I decided, life is a little too short to endure films in which women are punched in the face to their death for no discernible thematic purpose. Poor Jessica Alba (who plays the prostitute Affleck so graphically murders) and Kate Hudson (who plays his trampy-looking wife), who try their hardest, but seem to exist in this movie solely to wear skimpy clothing and be humiliated by the men around them.

A couple of reviews are more positive, but it seems like this movie will be an impossible sell for distributors.

Even Alba reportedly walked out of the film midway through. I wouldn't want to watch my head beaten to a bloody pulp on a big screen either.