Not a bad effort (SPOILERS)

Rating: 8/10 (19 November 2002)

I enjoyed Insomnia, because it is a story that is all too ordinary, and then again not.
Begins pretty obvious. Two hot shot detectives arrive in small town, trying to solve a murder. One very smart, one very slick.
The murder victim is a 17-year old girl. She's been beaten to death, and then, afterwards, washed and cleansed. It seems to be first victim of a serial-killer.
Luckily they are pretty clever, these detectives, so they lure the murderer into a ingenious trap, which fails, sadly.
But this is where the story takes a turn. One of the detectives (played by Al Pacino) is a little too clever. He's a bad good-guy, which has been a little too clever with the evidence in his early career, and the thing is, that his partner knows about it. And to make things even worse Internal Affairs are hot on his trail, and his partner is pretty sure that he's going to tell everything in order to save his own neck.
It's very foggy were the trap is set, and in all of the confusion (And all of the fog), Al Pacino shoots his partner. Maybe intentional. Maybe not.
Fact of the matter is, that when he is to give testimony, he tells a(nother) little white lie about how the shooting went down. No reason not to blame the murderer, right? He's a murderer anyway, you see.
But the night after, Al Pacinos character can't sleep. He's suffering from insomnia, constantly rethinking the events that led to his partners death.
That's when the murderer (Robin William) calls him. Seems the two of them have something in common now. None of them can sleep, and they both seem to have "accidently" killed someone.
The rest I will leave for you to enjoy as I did. You will see a thriller that could be pretty ordinary, but is saved by a good director, being the magnificent Christopher Nolan. Nolan understands to show - not overdo - subjective storytelling, where we are to understand why it's not a great thing not to sleep for 6 days or so.
Al Pacino. Well. He's good old Al. A great character-actor, which I find interesting to watch.
Robin Williams acting in this one I am very conflicted about. I didn't find him very scary. He seems a pathetic character, in the way you think of William H. Macys character in Fargo. But then again, maybe that's the whole point? Portraying a man which seems to be "Just a smart man that made a mistake". If so, he hasn't enough screentime.
Be it Robin Williams performance, or be it lack of twists in the story, I found the ending quite anticlimactic and kinda ordinary. That is why you should view this film as entertaining, not as film-study.

As entertainment it's pretty good, though. 8.