Tag: Detective

Night Hunter

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Here’s a script with so many ideas going off at different tangents that the resultant film struggles to do justice to any single one of them. It’s scarcely aided by a by-the-numbers score which robs most of the better scenes of any impact they might otherwise have had, turning the whole thing into homogenised Hollywood fodder. Perhaps it would have been better as a television mini-series or a novel, both of which formats might have allowed for less linear plot and exploration of several different ideas.

Marshall (a wooden Henry Cavill) lives apart from his wife, scarcely seen, and their daughter Faye (Emma Tremblay). The reason for their separation is, he can’t reconcile with family life his job as a detective hunting sex killers. If you’re wondering about the UK title, at one point he says that he hunts people who live in the dark whereas his daughter represents the light. Meanwhile, Cooper (Ben Kingsley) uses the teenage Lara (Eliana Jones) as bait to castrate pedophiles thus preventing their re-offending. When a car accident lands Cooper in police custody, his tracking device on Lara leads the police to capture serial sex killer and multiple personality Simon Stulls (Brendan Fletcher). However, that doesn’t stop further atrocities being committed…

To boil the film down to the essence described above, a lot’s been left out. For a start, much onscreen time is given to Marshall’s several police colleagues, notably psychological profiler Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) who is the second lead. She performs many interviews with the arrested Simon in a police interview room and even becomes his kidnap victim towards the end. There’s the merest hint that she and Marshall have had some sort of personal history together, but this is never really developed.

Marshall’s other colleagues include his superior Commissioner Harper (the ever-charismatic Stanley Tucci who consistently lights up the screen whenever he appears). Then there’s the fact that as well as his internal multiple personalities (spoiler alert) Simon the killer also has a real life, identical twin brother (Brendan Fletcher again). And Rachel unearths archive videotape footage of the brothers’ suicidal, rape victim mother Amy (Carlyn Burchell).

Frequent (attempted) emotional crisis is coupled with scenes of Marshall with Faye or Cooper with Lara to suggest treacly family values. Which seems a weird value to affirm given this is a cynical action movie about cops and vigilantes hunting sex murderers. Who exactly did the director or producers (of whom more shortly) think their audience was? Elsewhere, the film tips the viewing audience off about a car bomb about a minute before it happens for reasons of ineptitude rather than suspense. A woodlands hunt / shoot out / fight scene near a frozen lake towards the end threatens to be truly gripping until the clichéd music score kicks in and destroys the tense atmosphere. And so on.

In other words, this is a mish-mash, mostly no-good movie. You’ll get little idea of how all over the place it is from the promising-looking trailer. Solid camerawork plus halfway decent acting by Tucci, Kingsley and others can’t save it. No surprise that it has 34 listed producers of one sort or another (over 20 of them executive producers) – it feels like numerous different films vying for space rather than any single, unified vision.

Night Hunter is out in the UK in cinemas and on digital HD on Friday, September 13th. Its original title in the US was Nomis. It’s on VoD in April. Watch the film trailer below:

Out Of Blue

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Morley’s latest film is both infuriating and enthralling in equal measure. Infuriating because its convoluted plot, firing off in several directions one after another, is often nigh on impossible to follow. Enthralling because while you never quite know where you are, it periodically throws at you utterly compelling little visual clues and sequences of images as teasers to suggest narrative or other possibilities.

Some viewers are going to hate this film and wonder why they wasted their money to see it. Others like myself, while not showering the film with unqualified praise, are going to want to revisit it several times and get more out of it each time they return. If you’ve got the patience and are prepared to dig on a first viewing and return later to dig some more, there’s a lot waiting to be unearthed here.

After a brief introductory sequence in which astronomer Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer) talks to a small audience outside an observatory about the stars and our place in the universe, she becomes the subject of a homicide case. But who pulled the trigger and blew her face off?

Finding herself in charge of the investigation, Police Detective Mike Hoolihan (Patricia Clarkson) examines the crime scene. Rainfall has interfered with it through the opened telescope slit in the domed roof. She notes such objects as a gun, a sock, a high heeled shoe and a jar of skin cream. She is approached by and surprisingly quickly falls in with TV news reporter Stella Honey (Devyn Tyler) who appears at unexpected moments and disappears equally unexpectedly.

The two immediate murder suspects are Jennifer’s boss Dr. Ian Strammi (Toby Jones) – it was his gun and he covered up the telescope but didn’t close the roof – and her boyfriend Duncan Reynolds (Jonathan Majors) – it was his sock. Reynolds’ alibi was that he rushed home after lovemaking to work on an all-consuming academic theory, Strammi’s that he spent all night with a female student discussing Schrödinger’s Cat. Hoolihan’s boss Lieutentant Janey McBride (Yolanda Ross) and colleague Tony Silvero (Aaron Tveit) have different ideas, including the latter’s belief that the perpetrator is the .38 Calibre Killer who hasn’t killed since the 1980s.

Something doesn’t feel quite right to Hoolihan, though, so she turns her attention outwards to the victim’s family – war hero father Colonel Tom (James Caan), mother Miriam (Jacki Weaver) and their twin sons.

The plot may or may not be clearer in Martin Amis’ novel Night Train from which Morley’s script is adapted, although she’s apparently removed and added quite a lot of material. The New Orleans setting allows for a commendably interracial cast and a clutch of striking performances. Chief among these is Clarkson’s detective, trying to just get on and do her job even as elements from the case on which she’s working resonate with half-remembered memory fragments from her own past. Or perhaps they’re prophetic images from her future.

Morley tantalisingly baffles and dazzles us with repeating images: a red scarf blowing in the wind of an electric fan, blue necklace baubles dropping onto and bouncing on a floor. The piece ends as it begins with images of the stars in the sky above the city.

All this proceeds in a kaleidoscopic manner focusing on a character here and a bunch of images there until a point towards the end where one of the images furnishes a key clue as to what all this is about and the solution is abruptly revealed in a curt couple of lines of dialogue that could have been thrown in at any earlier point in the proceedings.

As far as Morley’s concerned, the plot doesn’t seem to be what really matters. Her interest lies elsewhere – trauma, memory, repression. Our past affecting our present. Some intensely personal events have influenced Morley’s directing: her father committed suicide when she was eleven and according to the press blurb there were characters and situations in Amis’ novel that she immediately recognised as from her past. If the film doesn’t work so well as a straightforward genre exercise, those viewers with the patience to let it speak to them on its own terms over multiple viewings will find it rich in meaning indeed.

Out Of Blue is out in the UK on Friday, March 29th. Before then, it screens in the Glasgow Film Festival on Wednesday and Thursday, February 27th and 28th. On VoD (BFI Player and other platforms) on Monday, October 21st.