Lacks something

Rating: 6/10 (23 October 2007)

It was hard for me to know what to expect when i sat down to watch "Zodiac". The word beforehand ranged from "very good" to "unbelievably slow and boring". As usual the truth was somewhere between the extremes.
"Zodiac" has one major flaw and one major advantage. We can start with the advantage: the actors. It was a long time since i saw a movie with this kind of ensemble. It seems almost every face is instantly recognizable from movies and TV, and all performances are top-notch. I especially liked Mark Ruffalos cop and John Carroll Lynch as an unusually creepy suspect. Brian Cox is as usual excellent in one of the best scenes of the movie (the TV-scene).
The major flaw in my opinion was the pacing. I acknowledge that it's a fairly complicated movie (although not so much as many have tried to claim) and that it encompasses a lot of time. While that may be true, there are still ways to make time fly a bit faster for the audience. In the beginning of the movie the pace was pretty good and the tension was high. But as the movie went on that seemed to bleed off. There are a few moments when the nerve returns in the end, but i still looked at my watch number of times in the last hour.
The pacing problem might suggest that i didn't like "Zodiac". But that's not true at all. Rather it's a good movie that has a few flaws that keep it from being great. The pacing being the worst of those. It has definite qualities though. The acting was the first one i mentioned. The second is the scope of the movie, it's an ambitious project to show decades of police work with the intense beginning and the dreary and long investigation, long after the media interest has died down.
In the end this won't make it into my favorite movies because of something i can't really put my finger on. This movie lacks something. While it has an interesting story, great acting and ambition, there is still something missing. It would be pretentious to call it "heart", but somehow that's the way it feels. David Fincher has always been a very competent but sometimes emotionally detached director. Sometimes that spills over and makes you care less about the movie than you would like to. That's unfortunately the feeling i got with "Zodiac".