Excellent - as a straightforward crime drama

Rating: 8/10 (25 January 2013)

For those who like their complex crime dramas, then David Fincher's 'Zodiac' is hard to beat. If you're after a dazzingly stylised Fincher flick along the lines of Fight Club, you are going to be SO disappointed.
Whilst Spike Lee's 'Summer Of Sam', which uses the backdrop of the real- life case of the 'Zodiac's murderous spree in 1970's San Francisco, to concentrate on various characters and is therefore a drama, Fincher goes for straightforward but extremely detailed and painstaking good old police work.
The trump card is the solid casting, necessary as the 150 mins duration might have become less than riveting otherwise, with a central triangle involving excellent performances from Robert Downey Jnr, Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo. Downey is an interestingly flamboyant reporter and Gyllenhaal a cartoonist at a newspaper that first receives cryptic messages, from the killer, whilst Ruffalo plays the police inspector involved in the case.
The disturbed letters taunt and confuse and the cartoonist thinks he sees a way of decoding them. You could say that the meat to the mostly veg of the film are the brief but very violent actual murders - nothing that shocking or different, at least these days but do give an indication that this was a brutal and disturbed sociopathic serial killer at work.
You might feel cheated that even at the end, the case remains unsolved - this is no 'spoiler', it's fact and instead of leaving one unsatisfied, it almost adds to the intrigue and a eerie sense of unease.
The period feel is spot-on and some of the music's good and whilst it certainly won't sit with everybody, anyone who enjoys a psychological profile, this is superb, safe in the knowledge that at least this one had not been made up and whilst Zodiac was released some 12 years after Fincher's own ground-breaking and classic 'Se7en', you can see the same mind expertly working both scenarios.