Z/Web

Good British gangster film. I’m not normally a big fan of the genre, but this one is good: the plot’s simple enough I could follow it. It’s basically the story of a ganster on Good Friday when his men start dying right and left, bombs going off, etc. Someone is trying to kill him and he has no idea who, so he sets out to find out and exact his rather grim justice. The ganster is played by the fabulous Bob Hoskins who is truly at his remarkable best in this film. The final scene of the film is a long closeup of Bob’s face as he goes through a series of expressions. It’s just amazing. You can practically see the cogs and wheels in his head turning as he’s trying to come to terms with the situation and various emotions flitter across his face like images on a TV screen. Just incredible. Worth watching just for his performance.

Director: David Fincher

This is an extremely well done film: good direction, acting, writing, etc. The topic is also stirring: a mysterious killer haunts the Bay Area in the late sixties and throughout the 1970s, sending cryptic coded messages to the SF Chronicle. Unfortunately, real life tends to interfere with a good story: the film never ends because the mystery’s never been solved. The film does a great job creating atmosphere and helping us to understand the chaos and bureaucracy that made catching the killer so difficult, but in the end I was left with a sort of “Why did I just sit through three hours of that?” Yes, that’s right — the film is nearly three hours long. It actually didn’t feel that long during it as I was fascinated, but the lackluster ending — basically everyone in the story gets old and eventually dies and the mystery’s never solved — really made it disappointing. I was waiting for a payoff I never received. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad film, just that I think it could have been better shorter and tighter. As it is it just keeps and building and building and then… nothing. That’s a bit frustrating, especially when everything else about the film is so good. It’s not really the filmmaker’s fault — it’s a real life story and that’s what happened — but the film could have been done differently to make the ending less of a letdown. For instance, the film ends with several screens of text description of what happened to the various characters. Some of that would have been better dramatized, showing a scene of what happened. That would have been more satisfying than just reading about it.