Wonderfully semi-documentary HEAVY SPOILER ALERT

Rating: 7/10 (15 October 2007)

When, somewhere in mid-movie, Inspector Armstrong announces to long-time partner Toschi that he plans to leave Homicide and devote his time to Fraud and Family WITHOUT getting gunned down on the proverbial verge of near-retirement or having Toschi running out of the car in slow motion, yelling "NO-O-O-O!" (one cliché I find it still harder to brook) it suddenly dawned on me how far this movie is from one of the great disappointments of last year, "Black Dahlia", with its "you'll-never-guess-this" absurdities and its nonsense solution of plot. "Zodiac" does not contain any surprises (apart from the fact that it doesn't have any surprises, which seems to have taken a lot of film-goers by surprise, regardless of the fact that it's about one of the great UNsolved cases in the 20th century); actually, it leans heavily on the documentary genre. Personally, I love mystery movies, I love detective stories, I'm a sucker for Poirot, Miss Marple, Chief Inspector Tennyson and even Morse, but I sort of like reality too, and "Zodiac" serves it in spades. What a relief, in a strange way, not to be told whodunit, but only who the respective detective characters in the movie think dunit, and leave it at that. The hapless trio of Toschi (Ruffalo), Graysmith (Gyllenhaal) and Avery (Downey Jr.) would be worth watching in this movie, even without the murders. The acting is great.