To Catch a Killer – Review
119 Minutes, Rated R
Written by Damian Szifron and Jonathan Wakeham
Directed by Damian Szifron
**NOTE: You can read Mark’s review below, then listen as he and Ryan discuss the movie in more detail (along with a discussion of Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant). Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST and watch all our video output over on YouTube.**
Synopsis:
Baltimore. New Year’s Eve. A talented but troubled police officer (Shailene Woodley) is recruited by the FBI’s chief investigator (Ben Mendelsohn) to help profile and track down a disturbed individual terrorizing the city.
Shailene Woodley is one of those actresses who is immensely talented, and Ben Mendelsohn is one of the great modern villains of cinema. That said, both here are woefully underutilized.
And Mendelsohn isn’t playing a villain, either. Surprise!
What is otherwise a fairly standard manhunt movie is punctuated by some pretty good cinematography, as overall the movie has a great look to it. The opening sequence of the mass killer claiming his victims is some of the most terrifying film in a while, showing how one might actually go about not simply killing people, but inflecting genuine fear on a populace and panic on law enforcement.
Other than that, the script is fairly rote, with the mentality behind the killer falling somewhere in the range of “average” if it was an episode of Criminal Minds in terms of creativity.
The studio is billing this as some sort of spiritual successor to The Silence of the Lambs, but that comparison is both grossly over-simplified and questionable in its applicability. Yes, the argument can be made, but it’s a pretty thin one.
Again, Woodley and Mendelsohn turn in fine performances of material far below a challengin level for each of them, and I can’t caution you away from seeing the film for precisely that reason. It’s fun to watch them work here, separately and together, and the opening sequence should be enough to grab your attention and keep you intrigued long enough to get to our two leads, which will carry you through the rest of the run time.
Definitely check it out, but it’s okay to wait for streaming if you’d like.
To Catch a Killer is in theaters now and stars Shailene Woodley, Ben Mendelsohn, Jovan Adepo, Rosemary Dunsmore, and Ralph Ineson.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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