You Kill Me: Can a Mob Hitman Find Love While Drying Out and Settling Scores?

For years the Polish mob in Buffalo, New York has been comfortably pursuing the profits of corruption in typical gang fashion. And, when someone needed to be whacked, they had ace hitman Frank Falenczyk (Ben Kingsley) to take care of it. Frank, bald-headed, off-beat and pridefully professional, takes only one thing more seriously than his work: his prodigious consumption of booze. And that thirst has become so great it's affecting his work.

When the Irish mob, headed by sociopath Edward O'Leary (Dennis Farina), shows signs of moving in on the gang's territory, Polish family patriarch and undisputed boss Roman Krzeminski (Philip Baker Hall) gives Frank the go-ahead to get rid of the Irishman at the airport. But Frank is so hammered when he stakes out his position in the parking lot, he sleeps through his target's arrival and, for the first time in his career, blows a hit. The result of this will be highly consequential.

Livid with anger and with no thought of granting a second chance, Roman banishes his family assassin to the distant outpost of San Francisco where the gang has friends and associates to control Frank while he's drying out. In fact, they're assigned to make sure he does.

The task mostly goes to loosely-moraled, urbanely dressed real estate agent Dave (Bill Pullman), who places his twisted charge in a very nice apartment and sets him up with a job at a mortuary where work on corpses isn't entirely new. That done, Dave, threatening to report any failures on Franks' part to Roman and the mob, sees Frank into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Exposed to a social environment that's completely alien and not a little fussy, Frank rejects it and returns to his addictive impulses. But Dave and AA sponsor Tom (Luke Wilson), a Golden Gate Bridge toll-taker and gay alcoholic, holds Frank's feet to the soil of recovery until they take root. Further encouraging him in the virtues of sobriety is the success of his work at the mortuary.