Directed By Damian Szifron

Starring – Shailene Woodley, Ben Mendelsohn, Ralph Ineson

The Plot – Baltimore. New Year’s Eve. A talented but troubled police officer (Woodley) is recruited by the FBI’s chief investigator (Mendelsohn) to help profile and track down a disturbed individual terrorizing the city.

Rated R for strong violent content, and adult language throughout

To Catch a Killer | Official Trailer (HD) | Vertical – YouTube

POSITIVES

Things get off to a roaring start with the opening introduction, with an ensuing action sequence full of urgency, intensity and of course vulnerability to the origins of its meticulously executed murder mystery, alongside an assassin of an antagonist who seems to convey that nowhere is out of their accessibility for devastation. What’s so effectively translating to the audience here is that this and other set pieces throughout the film are full of grit and candidness in depiction that bares more than a striking resemblance to the imagery of our own world plagued by gun fatalities, but also proves that the protagonists of authority that we investigate alongside by, will have an immensely difficult task of hunting a man who seamlessly vanishes without a trace for them to rest their investigation on. During these moments, the film is blessed with precision in pacing that makes the most of its minutes inside of a nearly two hour run time, with thickness for atmospheric dread and hypnotically entrancing visuals inside of its decorated cinematography that simultaneously generate the artistic style of the film with the immensity of Baltimore. These instances give us many wide and overhead angles of the city, but also these unique vantage points behind guns or surveillance cameras that cater towards the complexity of Szifron’s artistic impulses. Lastly, the work here from the gifted ensemble are mostly reputable, but Mendelsohn takes it to a whole other level as the head of the FBI with his own suppressed secrets. Ben garners such a gravitational presence to scenes he positively decorates, and with an element of obsession that dominates the character’s determination, his cool calmness is eventually unraveled within the depths of the investigation, allowing him to feel unchained in the sea of sleepless nights that have kept this case a constant in his frayed and frazzled memory.

NEGATIVES

So much potential in set-up and first act perfection goes wasted in an inferior second half, which nearly obliterates everything about it that continuously drove momentum throughout the engagement. For starters, the film bares more than a striking resemblance to many predecessors of the genre that came before it, with a script that does little positively to differentiate itself from those sentiments. This is felt the loudest in the one-dimensional rendering of Woodley’s youthful officer, a tortured soul with a bad past, who bares a unique connection to the killer she’s hunting. If we called this “Silence of the Lambs”, it might generate interest, but it wouldn’t be fair to the feats that film was able to achieve, with bland immitators like this one still being churned out in dozens each decade. Beyond this, the mystery itself grinds to a screeching halt during a floundering second act, full of internal beaureaucracies and external social commentary that obscures the integrity of its fictional intentions with heavy-handed views that feel constructed out of thin air, while halting the progress of the narrative surrounding it. This aspect wasn’t needed in the first place, but it doesn’t exploit anything provocative about what it desparately conjures, instead feeling like surface level observations about gun violence and media manipulation that never conjures anything provocative within the material, leaving the justification in its exploration strapped for logic. Speaking of logical stretching, some of the film’s framing devices feel strangely irresponsible in the sentiments they’re conveying, particularly one during the film’s third act, which left the film feeling a bit irredeemible by the arguments it tries to make for its killer. Once the identity is revealed, the backstory begins to take shape, illustrating an abusive and tortured childhood, and while those elements clearly made the monster, the fact that he took the lives of over 200 people throughout the film left me feeling appalled for how the film tried to outline him as this victim of his own genetic make-up, with a resolution that feels too stretched and surreal to ever feel satisfying. Finally, while I am a fan of Shailene Woodley, and find her to be a strong dramatic actress, she’s simply miscast in a role that does her no favors. Part of the problem is the mundanity of her character design, affording her few moments of dramatic intensity to match Mendelsohn pound for pound, but for my money the bigger problem is in her phoned-in portrayal for the character, with a void of energy or personality that makes her a treat to follow throughout the mystery’s duration. Because of such, this feels like a paycheck film for Woodley, as well as a major missed opportunity to shed the conventions of her typical typecasting that have kept her from attaining the kind of projects that she deserves as a compelling actress.

OVERALL
“To Catch a Killer” gets off to a promising start with an intensely supercharged opening sequence that garners style and stimulation to the air of inescapable danger but can’t maintain consistency throughout a nearly two-hour duration that often gets the better of the film, the longer it persists. Plagued by the usual suspects of predictably familiar murder mystery formula, as well as a devastatingly silly ending full of hollow talking points and offensive framing devices, the film’s prominence is often searching for clues it never finds in a series of untimely misfires, plaguing it as one for the pile of underwhelming imitators inspired by “The Silence of the Lambs”.

My Grade: 4/10 or D-