Boston Strangler - Review Thread

For much of last year 20th Century Studios almost completely abandoned theatrical distribution and basically became a content generator for Hulu while patiently waiting for that legacy contract with HBO to finally expire. In October they finally started putting some movies into theaters but if the film Boston Strangler is any indication they aren’t above sending stuff straight to streaming if they don’t seem like they’ll be big profit generators and that seems to be exactly the determination that was made in the case of this true crime account looking at the titular serial killer from the perspective of a journalist who viewed themselves as having held the Boston P.D.’s feet to the fire. The movie this plainly wants to be is Zodiac but director Matt Ruskin is no David Fincher and this movie is no Zodiac. Ruskin doesn’t really do much to establish the film’s time period separate from the police and journalistic milieus, that or they just didn’t have the budget to fill the screen with such details, and the whole movie is just generally kind of lifeless. Keira Knightley isn’t exactly “bad” in the lead but her character doesn’t really have much personality beyond being “determined” and if you compare the journalistic process details here with what we see in something like She Said it really feels lacking. Eventually the film gets into something of a true crime conspiracy theory in the ending, which is at least interesting on paper, but by the time we get there I’d pretty well checked out of this one. Not recommended.
** out of Five