Post by Dracula on Nov 26, 2022 9:54:39 GMT -5
The Good Nurse10/30/2022
The very first review I ever wrote for my blog was for the David Fincher movie Zodiac and I remember that at one point in the review I commented that the Zodiac killer was notable for having not actually killed that many people and for essentially building an outsized reputation among serial killers through media manipulation. Kind of a morbid point that seems a little tasteless in retrospect, but what’s interesting is that to make that point I wrote the following: “Charles Cullen killed eight times as many people, yet Zodiac has had five times as many movies made about him.” This Charles Cullen I was referring to was a male nurse working in the New Jersey area who was convicted of coldly killing dozens of patients by administering intentional insulin overdoses that often did not register as homicides for unclear reasons. At the time I’m pretty sure I only found the name “Charles Cullen” from a google search moments before writing that and technically speaking the point I made isn’t even true… at the time there had actually been zero movies about Cullen and by many accounts he actually killed far more than eight times as many as the Zodiac Killer. Cullen has made up some ground in race for having films made about him since then however. The year after I wrote that someone made a direct-to-video movie called Killer Nurse that was based on him and now, fifteen years later, this monster finally has his own Hollywood produced procedural about his eventual capture.
Despite the serial killer subject matter, The Good Nurse is not really a thriller and is instead a sort of procedural drama about the investigation that would eventually reveal what Charles Cullen (played here by Eddie Redmayne) was doing. Early on the focus here seems to be on the various difficulties that the detectives on the case (played by Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich) have in trying to investigate it given the extent to which the hospitals in question hinder their investigation to cover their assess. In fact the extent to which systemic failures and bad incentives contributed to the length of Cullen’s covert killing spree is probably the most interesting aspects of the film but that’s kind of dropped in the second half when it really focuses in on Cullen himself and the fellow nurse (played by Jessica Chastain) who detectives enlist to aid in the investigation. That, to me, is a missed opportunity. At the end of the day Cullen himself is not particularly interesting. He’s basically never explained why he did what he did and we don’t get much in the way of further insight here and the way he was captured was, at the end of the day, fairly by the book detective work. If anything I would have rather seen a movie about the lawsuits that were eventually filed against the hospitals in question, that’s an evil that feels a little more worth interrogating. Beyond that, eh, this is alright. It’s got a rather over-qualified cast and moves along well enough but I feel like it could have been a lot more.
*** out of Five
The very first review I ever wrote for my blog was for the David Fincher movie Zodiac and I remember that at one point in the review I commented that the Zodiac killer was notable for having not actually killed that many people and for essentially building an outsized reputation among serial killers through media manipulation. Kind of a morbid point that seems a little tasteless in retrospect, but what’s interesting is that to make that point I wrote the following: “Charles Cullen killed eight times as many people, yet Zodiac has had five times as many movies made about him.” This Charles Cullen I was referring to was a male nurse working in the New Jersey area who was convicted of coldly killing dozens of patients by administering intentional insulin overdoses that often did not register as homicides for unclear reasons. At the time I’m pretty sure I only found the name “Charles Cullen” from a google search moments before writing that and technically speaking the point I made isn’t even true… at the time there had actually been zero movies about Cullen and by many accounts he actually killed far more than eight times as many as the Zodiac Killer. Cullen has made up some ground in race for having films made about him since then however. The year after I wrote that someone made a direct-to-video movie called Killer Nurse that was based on him and now, fifteen years later, this monster finally has his own Hollywood produced procedural about his eventual capture.
Despite the serial killer subject matter, The Good Nurse is not really a thriller and is instead a sort of procedural drama about the investigation that would eventually reveal what Charles Cullen (played here by Eddie Redmayne) was doing. Early on the focus here seems to be on the various difficulties that the detectives on the case (played by Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich) have in trying to investigate it given the extent to which the hospitals in question hinder their investigation to cover their assess. In fact the extent to which systemic failures and bad incentives contributed to the length of Cullen’s covert killing spree is probably the most interesting aspects of the film but that’s kind of dropped in the second half when it really focuses in on Cullen himself and the fellow nurse (played by Jessica Chastain) who detectives enlist to aid in the investigation. That, to me, is a missed opportunity. At the end of the day Cullen himself is not particularly interesting. He’s basically never explained why he did what he did and we don’t get much in the way of further insight here and the way he was captured was, at the end of the day, fairly by the book detective work. If anything I would have rather seen a movie about the lawsuits that were eventually filed against the hospitals in question, that’s an evil that feels a little more worth interrogating. Beyond that, eh, this is alright. It’s got a rather over-qualified cast and moves along well enough but I feel like it could have been a lot more.
*** out of Five
