To Catch A Killer: Some Wonderful Shots and Action, Not Enough Story

**CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS

I was excited to see this, as Shailene Woodley is always a consistently wonderful actor. With a very exciting opening, filled with surprisingly unique and noteworthy camera angles, I had hope that I was in for a thrilling ride. Disappointingly, as with most films I see nowadays, the story was sorely lacking.

And so it begins

Set in Baltimore starting on New Years Eve, the city is sieged in terror by a mass shooter. This time, the shooter is ranger style and randomly picks off 29 people from his posted point. Officer Eleanor Falco (Shailene Woodley) young and without much experience, is on shift with, what will become, the most important case of her life so far.

Falco answers the call only to witness a massive explosion, in a high-rise apartment where the killer had once posted. In the smoke filled apartment, Falco catches the attention of the FBI agent, Geoffrey Lammarck (Ben Mendelsohn), who is taking over the case and becomes a mentor for her.

What follows is the slow, much too talky road to figuring out who this shooter is and catching him.

Clarice starling? Not so much

Source: Vertical Entertainment

The publicity for this film compares it as a new Silence of The Lambs. Not only are those big shoes to fill, but it sets up the audience for something that this film couldn’t possibly hold up to.

Falco is the main character, but she is woefully quiet during much of the investigation. When she isn’t, she is given sexist jobs like holding a crying baby of a witness being interrogated, instead of the other male officer, Mackenzie (Jovan Adepo). Dismissed and looked down upon by almost everyone, she struggles to find a place within the investigation.

Like Clarice Starling, Falco has an innate ability to see what isn’t obviously seen, and becomes a crucial part of tracking down and ultimately catching the serial killer, but it isn’t in any way close to the level that Clarice is.

Where Clarice is given power to investigate on her own, interrogate Lecter and control the scenes of each of Buffalo Bill’s victims, Falco is set aside and wholly diminished by those around her, including Lammarck. He makes sure to express how unqualified she is; her lack of education and her lack of mental fitness to be doing this job in the first place.

Falco is left in silence for the most part and crying about her past traumas that are never quite clear. She is said to have struggles with addiction, but not only is drinking encouraged by her colleagues who know she is an addict, but she actually drinks and it is treated casually as if she weren’t. She is rarely strongly vocal and remains meek to the very end.

Source: Vertical Entertainment

In All Honesty…

To Catch A Killer is an awkwardly, lackadaisical serial killer film devoid of characterization, story depth and action.

It is two hours of mostly office scenes, where all anyone does is talk to each other and belittle Falco. The small amount of action scenes are quite exciting but the film drops its audience off for such long periods of talking tedium that any interest becomes void.

Most of the characters are so underdeveloped that we don’t really care about any of them. The killer himself, set up to be so ghastly, ends up trying to justify his actions with a story that, instead of killing mass amounts of people, could’ve been taken care of much more easily in a therapist’s office.

He isn’t the cold, calculated killer seen in Lambs, but more someone disgruntled by capitalism. The film tries really hard to give him a past that may align with his actions but ultimately we find out that it was pretty normal overall. They throw in being shot by a pellet gun as a child as one of the reasons for why he “isn’t right”. Really?

Even how he kills his victims is very distant and impersonal with no commonalities between the victims, which ends up leaving us with a feeling that the reason for these killings is “just because”. None of them were or did anything except be within his gun site.

Source: Vertical Entertainment

How Falco is used throughout the film gives us no reason that the killer also wouldn’t just shoot her as well. Why would someone so reckless stop to have a chat with her? There isn’t anything special about her nor does she possess something that he would want.

They draw a very weak similarity between them at the end, but it in no way explains why he would spare her. Anyone other than Falco could have been used for that and it wouldn’t have changed the story. Even his reasoning behind the mass killings was weak at best.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, great writing is the foundation of any good film. There is no amount of action, stars or FX that can save a weak script that was never fully fleshed out. More disappointingly is that this was originally a book, so, if the book was well done, they had all of the characterization already done for them.

Anyone looking to be thrilled, scared or connected to characters will end up disappointed