A mixed bag of good and tedious scenes.

Rating: 6/10 (27 July 2007)

If they wanted to give moviegoers a sense of how painstaking and tedious soving a serial killer case can be, they succeeded. I really felt for the detectives (and civilians) wanting so badly to catch the murderer. But as an audience member, I had to sit through a lot of banter back and forth involving methodology, code-cracking, and leg work.
Maybe that is why films based entirely on fiction are more thrilling, they don't have to go out of their way to do justice to the lives of real living people who worked so hard. I can understand them wanting to show these men's lives outside of the work, but this made for a very long viewing experience without enough suspense or fleshed-out drama to make it top notch.
One thing for which I must praise Fincher is that he kept the violence to a minimum, as this movie was more about the investigation than the crimes themselves, and rightfully so--hence the higher grade than I might normally give. Totally worth seeing, but not a "you've gotta see it" movie.