‘To Catch a Killer’ Review: Shailene Woodley Hunts a Mass Shooter on the Loose in Baltimore – Variety
In 2014, Argentine writer-director Damian Szifron made a substantial splash with “Wild Tales.” The Oscar-nominated, Almodóvar-produced function consisted of six escalatingly over-the-top tales that put a blackly comedian slant on human behaviors at their worst, including as much as a flamboyantly gratifying complete. It’s stunning that it’s taken him almost a decade to ship his subsequent function, and extra stunning nonetheless that it seems to be his English-language debut “To Catch a Killer.”
This Baltimore-set thriller, with Shailene Woodley as a cop serving to FBI agent Ben Mendelsohn monitor down a mass shooter, is the display screen equal of a page-turner: a strong investigative procedural that breaks no new floor, however delivers ample suspense, character curiosity, and motion in assured trend. Nonetheless, it’s a curiously impersonal, straight-ahead style piece for a writer-director who so assertively staked out his terrain as an auteur the final time round. Vertical Leisure is opening it on 500+ U.S. screens this Friday.
Amidst fireworks noise, attendees at a penthouse New 12 months’s Eve social gathering are sluggish to comprehend they’re beneath deadly assault by sniper fireplace, as are others within the surrounding space. When police arrive and hint the trajectory of bullets, they determine the shooter is (or was) in a high-rise reverse — a suspicion confirmed when a flat in that constructing explodes, erasing any proof. By then, twenty-nine folks have been killed by a marksman so knowledgeable that not a single shot missed, or merely wounded.
Amongst avenue cops initially responding to the emergency is Eleanor Falco (Woodley). Later, FBI investigator Lammark (Mendelsohn) overhears her speculations in regards to the bloodbath — whereas others assume some terrorist group is concerned, she thinks it’s a lone wolf — and is impressed. He figures she’s both received the makings of an excellent detective, is as messed-up because the perp, or, because it seems, each. He’s an ornery, exacting sort with little respect for native police personnel, so he requisitions this low-ranking officer as a “liaison” who’ll work alongside him and his sole different chosen teammate, the extra affable Mackenzie (Jovan Adepo).
Lammark is as but unaware that Falco had beforehand utilized to turn into an FBI agent, and failed the psychological testing. She’s one thing of a lone wolf herself, with a traumatic previous that isn’t very properly illuminated in Szifron and Jonathan Wakeham’s script, however which underlines a too-obvious debt to “The Silence of the Lambs” in drawing a devoted however troubled feminine protagonist.
As police indiscriminately arrest each paranoid malcontent in sight, anxious to quell public strain, our central trio seek for their quarry in additional methodical trend. That frustrates politicians, media and different powers searching for fast outcomes, a state of affairs worsened when there’s a second mass taking pictures, nearly definitely by the identical individual. The movie’s final half hour leaves the town for a wintry countryside the place that assassin is in hiding, and their explanatory discontents (till just lately, the venture was titled “Misanthrope”) are revealed.
As that intel spills out in some awkward speechifying, it’s a bit too late to make any significant assertion in regards to the form of resentful social isolation, conspiracy theorizing and bigotry that usually appears to create such trigger-happy monsters as we speak. Likewise, the complexities of Woodley and Mendelsohn’s “tough” characters aren’t probed sufficient within the writing to really feel absolutely realized, although each performers are wonderful.
Nonetheless, the movie does work fairly properly as a procedural thriller, sustaining a tense, haunted environment between peaks of skillfully realized motion. Significantly good are scenes through which we all know one thing horrible is about to occur in a mall meals courtroom, and a shootout in a sequence drugstore — Szifron (who’s additionally editor right here) and cinematographer Javier Julia make the tasteless brightness of these retail settings crackle with imminent hazard.
The notion of metropolis as potential target-shooting vary is depicted vividly sufficient that there’s one thing anticlimactic in regards to the closing rural stretch, competently staged as it’s. Montreal stands in capably sufficient for Baltimore in a concurrently modern and gritty design bundle whose solely duff observe is a slight extra of aerial pictures (and gimmicky upside-down views) in Julia’s in any other case first-rate widescreen images.
Certainly, the worst factor you may say about “To Catch a Killer” is that it’s so adeptly executed in all departments that one is dissatisfied it finally ends up feeling a tad generic. It’s engrossing, typically thrilling, but by no means absolutely free from an general sense of derivation. It’s the traditional case of a film adequate, with sufficiently robust expertise onboard, that you simply surprise why it isn’t higher — why a progress that firmly holds a viewer for 2 hours leaves so fleeting an impression afterward.
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