‘Killing Zoe’ (R)

Given just a bit of advance information, I would never have chosen to sit through a toxic, repulsive film like "Killing Zoe." For starters, it was written and directed by 27-year-old Robert Avary, a protege of Quentin Tarantino, purveyor of such critically chic, casually callous ultra-violence as the grunge noir "Natural Born Killers" and "Reservoir Dogs." Consider yourself informed.

Wan and charmless Eric Stoltz stars as Zed, an American safecracker who arrives in Paris to assist his childhood friend Eric (Jean-Hughes Anglade) in pulling off a Bastille Day bank heist. A cabdriver sends over a prostitute named Zoe (Julie Delpy), a childlike creature who inexplicably takes a liking to the cadaverously passive Stoltz -- at least until manic Anglade arrives and begins slapping her around, shoving her nakedinto the hotel hallway.

Gone are the days of the suave cat burglars and their high-class capers -- Anglade and his greasy gang of Gallic goons are rank (literally) amateurs, prepared with just a cursory glance at the bank blueprints. Among this bunch, the somnambulant Stoltz looks almost like leading man material.

Instead of going over the plans on the eve of the job, Anglade and the boys take Stoltz out to a squalid subterranean speak-easy for a night of premature celebration, where monstrous quantities of heroin and other mystery substances are consumed to the accompaniment of Dixieland -- this is the Gang That Couldn't Shoot Up Straight. In this grotesquely prolonged scene, Avary gets the bleary, prelude-to-a-migraine atmosphere nauseatingly right, and for a while, "Killing Zoe" becomes a particularly gross and rampantly misogynistic parody of male-bonding and "buddy" movies. For all the uncontrolled substances ingested in these 96 minutes, it seems the most dangerous drug around is testosterone.

When Stoltz regains consciousness the next day, he's hustled to the bank, where the robbers don carnival masks and begin taking hostages -- one of whom is wrong-place, wrong-time Delpy, at her day job as a bank teller. While Stoltz sets to opening the safe, upstairs in the bank lobby, things go quickly amiss for Anglade and his sloppy, trigger-happy thugs, and the remainder of the film is a debacle of I-dare-you-to-look carnage and gore. There have to be better ways of wasting money and killing time than the fashionable nihilism of "Killing Zoe."

KILLING ZOE (R) -- Contains extreme violence and language and unappetizing sex.