Boston Strangler (2023) If you take this film apart minute by minute, there's nothing especially bad about it......
Competently acted, professionally put together. Every so often it succeeds in its dedicated efforts to maintain an atmosphere of creepy dread.
Put all of its elements together, you still end up with less than the sum of its parts.
Before even halfway into it, I could already identify it as a worn out, tired, less than inspired imitation of "Zodiac".
Same depressive green-gray photography. Some low volume music murmuring over the soundtrack, clueing you in that terrible things are happening......or will happen.
Everything's in place, so we must be in for an unsettling, near horrific rendition of a true events.
But when the final credits roll, prepare to sit there unmoved, knowing you've just semi-slept through a machine-tooled, studied replica of some infinitely better feature films......(take you pick - "Zodiac",, "Silence Of The Lambs", "Seven"..... yada, yada, yada......)
So why sit through this story again, if you've already viewed Richard Fleischer's 1968 "The Boston Stranger"? That's the one famous for its use of the the then faddish split screen sequences and Tony Curtis's surprising third-act appearance as Albert DeSalvo, the hulking brute accused and convicted of all the strangulations.
The new film reveals the truth of the matter (multiple stranglers) was actually dug up by a pair of dogged women reporters (Keira Knightley, Carrie Coon)........with the two women forced to labor under the withering, condescending and combative eyes of both their editors and the Boston Police department.
As I said before, I can't fault the components here. But the movie never catches fire, or ever develops its own pulse. No real sense of urgency, no juice......the film's content to steep itself in an ominous, self-satisfied cloud of gloom, thinking that'll be enough to grab a viewer.
It isn't. 2 stars (**), never more than barely okay.
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