Reptile
Benicio Del Toro moves with sinewy grace through writer-director Grant Singer’s debut feature “Reptile,” but the film can’t build a strong enough identity around him, and it eventually falls apart. Clearly inspired by David Fincher’s meticulousness Singer is also a music video vet who has worked with the Weeknd, Skrillex, Sam Smith and many more “Reptile” is too mannered about its details, but its biggest mistake is assuming that procedurals need to get messier only in their convolutions. As always, Del Toro brings it, this is actually one of his more interesting performances in recent memory. But you keep wishing it were in a movie that had any idea what to do with him.
Will Grady (Justin Timberlake) is a Scarborough real estate magnate dating an agent named Summer (Matilda Lutz). They flip foreclosed houses in the area under the watchful eye of Will’s mom Camille (Frances Fisher), and there appears to be some relationship-strain brewing. One day, Will meets Summer at a house she’s showing and discovers her brutally murdered.
The suspects pile up quickly for Detective Tom Nichols (Del Toro) and his partner Dan Cleary (Ato Essandoh). First off, Grady couldn’t be creepier Timberlake leans way too hard into the slimy silver spoon kid backstory of the kind of guy who lines up a new girlfriend who looks a lot like his dead one almost immediately and he does seem to be into some shady shit, but he found the body right? Or did he? Could it be Summer’s soon to be ex husband Sam (Karl Glusman)? He too is sketched as a few cards short of a full deck he’s introduced on CCTV cutting a stranger’s hair so he can turn it into art; yeah, he’s weird or could it be Eli Phillips (Michael Pitt), a guy whose dad got screwed on a Grady deal? Did he kill Summer for revenge?
But if that were not enough murderers to choose from, the script by Singer, Benjamin Brewer and Del Toro himself rounds out an epic ensemble of people in Tom’s orbit at the precinct, including his wife Judy (an effective Alicia Silverstone), who helps him work angles on the case in some of the film’s best scenes she is fearless and intellectually engaged by this mystery. She knows and loves Captain Robert Allen (Eric Bogosian), Tom’s boss, who is introduced receiving an MS diagnosis, yes, this is one of those screenplays where every character has such an instantly identifiable trait that tries to take a traditional character just a touch left-of-center. It’s all over written, exaggerated stuff that only reminds you that you’re watching a movie.
It’s fine, I suppose, to know about a writer’s voice or director’s eye no one could accuse David Fincher of being a passive observer but the issue with “Reptile” is style versus vision. There is so much style here but it never seems to add up to an actual vision. Mike Gioulakis (“It Follows,” “Split”) moves his camera through these cavernous spaces, but for what? Does it mean anything? The style of “Reptile” becomes more and more empty as its 134 minutes drag on and on. “Reptile” tries to do too many things at once and lands none of them, leaving subplots unresolved and characters inconsistent.
And yet, there is that performance at the center. Del Toro is so good here playing a man who has seen everything and just wants some peace which will not come. He does not overdo trauma or experience; he lets those things affect his body language and the looks from those unforgettable eyes. It is also a funny performance at times as Tom applies parts of his real estate journey onto home remodeling, there are some solid turns in the ensemble Silverstone, Bogosian, Pitt but Del Toro is existing in another space entirely, a space that should have been occupied by a much better movie.
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