Premise: A former detective and a hot shot city detective try to find a serial killer.
I've tried starting this Reaction a few times and every time, it gets snarky very quickly. Instead, let me just be direct. This movie is based on a screenplay written in 1993 and it shows. The movie is set in the mid-90s for no specific reason. Other than cell phones maybe, there's isn't much to this that needs to be a period piece. More importantly though, this plays like any of the crime movies of the 90s. It's got the characters of a Se7en, the story of a Kiss the Girls, and the legal dubiousness of a Double Jeopardy. Even that much is fine. I enjoy a throwback. I too lament the disappearance of the mid-level budget movie for grownups. The problem is that the movie doesn't want to comment on anything from the last 25 years either. I'm not sure I need more movies about men terrorizing character-less women. Women exist in this movie to be pictures on Denzel Washington's wall, which is something I really thought we'd all moved past. The bigger issue though I can't really talk about without spoiling some of the movie. The way things resolve in the end of this movie involves a type of police work that is really tone deaf to the last few years. Partly thanks to Denzel's own work in Training Day, opinions of cops taking advantage of the rules to save their own asses have changed significantly. The movie doesn't comment at all on how fucked up it is when a cop brazenly bends the system to his advantage. If anything, it has sympathy for the detectives breaking the rules.
Even if I stop looking at the movie with modern lenses and try to enjoy it as a simple throwback, I didn't really care for the movie very much. Denzel plays a former L.A. detective who burned out and moved out of L.A. to be a small-town cop. A clerical task takes him back to L.A. for a few days where he gets involved with investigating a serial killer case that Rami Malek is the lead detective on. They soon zero in on Jared Leto, playing the most suspicious person ever, as the lead suspect. It's then a game of wits to see who can outsmart whom. Denzel can play this role well in his sleep - best in the business, with a haunted past, and is his own worst enemy. He's the only main performance I came close to liking. That said, I think his character would make more sense if he played the role in 1993. The man is 66 now. Even if we cross the customary 15 years off the age of any of his roles, he still feels too old for this. Maybe that's just me though. Rami Malek is a very specific on-screen presence. He doesn't play decency or natural well. He can be cocky but not an everyman, which is his role in this unfortunately. He's a hotshot detective with a normal family life, and I swear I saw the envy in Malek's eyes every time he shared a scene with Jared Leto. Leto is fine, I guess. Personally, I'm a little tired of Leto going big and weird in performances. I am so confused about how he got SAG and Golden Globe nominations for this performance. That performance in this movie has no business getting any awards attention.
I don't think I hated the movie. It feels like a waste of three Oscar winners, but that's true of a lot of movies. I wish the crime and investigation was a little more interesting in the movie. I found the conclusion intentionally deflating, which would've been fine had it been making a point that felt more relevant.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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