I only recently got around to seeing “Zodiac”, last year’s film about the “Zodiac Killer” who terrorized San Francisco in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The most memorable aspect of this film prior to my viewing it had to be the controversy surrounding a certain blogger plagiarizing an entire review directly from the San Francisco Chronicle.
After seeing this flick, it struck me as being two or three different movies in one. It starts out as a buddy-cop film, evolves into a horror movie and then turns into a one-man quest to solve a crime. A film with multiple personalities can be at turns pretty cool and pretty confusing. I felt like “Zodiac” got lost in dismissing and not following up on certain suspects, namely Robert Vaughn, played by Charles Fleischer in possibly the creepiest role I’ve seen in recent years. Jake Gyllenhaal’s line, “Not many people have basements in California,” is the precursor to the eeriest scene of the movie.
A star-studded cast, a still-unsolved mystery, an air-tight pursuit of historical accuracy, a dramatic story, an eye-pleasing setting … it would seem that everything was there for a wonderful film, but it falls short. Part of that may be due to the fact that the “Zodiac Killer” has yet to be definitely identified, so there can be no conclusion per se. But it’s also partly due to the idea that this one tried to cover too many genres -- without satisfying any one completely.
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