Disappointing, uneven

Rating: 5/10 (17 April 2019)

Zodiac was surprisingly poorly done given the pedigree of all involved. This very long movie is pretty horrible until we jump forward in time to the late 70's, when it finally finds its stride and becomes quite engaging. Overall it is paced and edited almost like a comedy -- late cuts into scenes to get a few lines of zippy dialog, then quick cuts out to rush on to the next plot point. It completely doesn't work as a creepy, suspenseful serial killer movie, which requires long slow takes full of dread and anticipation.
There basically is very little interest by Fincher is the actual crimes (the original Zodiac killing doesn't even make the cut, as we start halfway through his spree 6 months later). Instead he is focused on a kind of shifting buddy movie (first between Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr. as co-workers at the San Francisco Chronicle, then later between Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo as detective David Toschi). This is a weirdly Hollywood move to me -- let's make the movie about the all-American (if flawed) good guys, not about the killer or the victims or the dread in the city at large.
Downey, Jr. is awful -- straight up. It's a scenery-chewing performance you'd expect to find at a community theatre. Anthony Edwards -- as Ruffalo's partner -- is pretty bad too. Brian Cox's portrayal of Melvin Belli is ridiculous and doesn't ring true. There's just a LOT of bad acting in this movie.
My sense after watching it, and seeing how immensely the movie improved once it got to the late 70's and turns into a kind of Richard-Dreyfuss-Close-Encounters movie about a man destroying his family life with a weird obsession, is that it should have started in the late 70's then flashed back to the original story in the late 60's as needed (which might have been very little indeed, given all the bad performances in that part of the footage).
A small detail but one that somehow captures the weird, unpoetic and uncomfortable relationship this movie has with its own narrative: as we zip around from location to location we are constantly being given subtitles telling us where we are. I.e., "The Corner of Washington and Cherry" -- and every time we go back there we get that title again -- as if we can't recognize the location on our own. Well, we CAN'T recognize it, because Fincher failed to associate an iconic image with the intersection that he could cut to at the start of the scene to place us, without using subtitles. The movie is just klutzy throughout in hundreds of little ways like that, distracting you from the story with its graceless style. By the end I felt like it was made by people just clocking in to earn a paycheck.
In a way I think the best movie about the VIBE of the Zodiac (without being about him at all) is Phillip Kaufman's very creepy Invasion of the Body Snatchers, released in 1978 and set in the same San Francisco -- it could be seen as a metaphor for the breaking down of the social contract (as most viciously embodied by someone like the Zodiac) in late 70's America.