Zodiac (2007)

Directed by David Fincher
My rating: 2 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, Paramount/Warner Bros)

David Fincher's epic treatment of California's famous Zodiac Killer claims to have been exhaustively researched and true to the facts. It's basically a police procedural, sort of an NCIS only with explicit violence. The main problem, other than its extreme length, is poorly drawn characters. We hardly get to know the two main police investigators before the trail goes cold and they essentially give up. Fincher is more interested in the less interesting newspapermen, Robert Downey Jr and Jake Gyllenhaal. Downey is an obnoxious hot shot reporter with a drinking problem and Gyllenhaal a timid cartoonist. By the time the second act arrives, Gyllenhaal miraculously becomes an obsessed detective, his life ruined by his pursuit of the killer's indentity. It's a transformation that seems hardly likely given his character in the first half. Suddenly, all of the pieces start falling in place for Gyllenhaal, in a rush of insight and information. His payoff, and ours, is a brief glimpse of the killer as an employee in a hardware store. Hardly worth his job and family, or nearly 3 hours of our time.