NIGHT HUNTER / CERT: UNRATED / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: DAVID RAYMOND / STARRING: HENRY CAVILL, BEN KINGSLEY, ALEXANDRA DADDARIO, STANLEY TUCCI / RELEASE DATE: 13TH SEPTEMBER
For years now, mainstream cinema has tried to copy the Scandi-Noir blueprint. It falls short more often than not, most notably in the borderline incomprehensible The Snowman. It took a filmmaker of the caliber of David Fincher to pull it off and even his Girl with the Dragon Tattoo failed to bring anything new to the table.
While an original screenplay, Night Hunter borrows freely from the Scandi-Noir toolbox: tundra-like environment, heroes with messy personal lives and personality disorders and eccentric serial killers. The setup is not terrible, but the execution is reminiscent of a car crash. One can only imagine what was going through Henry Cavill, Stanley Tucci and Ben Kingsley’s minds while shooting this movie in the midst of the unforgiving Manitoba winter. “I hope the cheque doesn’t bounce,” maybe?
The plot: The Minnesota police is hot on the trail of a serial kidnapper who targets teenage girls and deafens them no good reason. Leading the investigation is Detective Marshall (Cavill), a taciturn policeman whose skill at tackling psychopaths has distanced him from his family (we see no indication he is good at his job, by the way). The investigation forces him to partner with Cooper (Kingsley), a retired judge turned vigilante who seems to have better tech than the police to deal with sex offenders.
Night Hunter throws a lot of plot at you, hoping that something sticks. Little does. The film mistakenly focuses on the dullest character while the far more interesting Judge Cooper spends most of the movie off-screen. Ever the pro, Sir Ben creates a character out of a pile of tropes – an ability not shared by Henry Cavill, whose idea of portraying a weathered detective is not combing his hair. If there was an award for recognisable actors stuck in pointless roles, Nathan Fillion and Minka Kelly would be way ahead in the running as tech cop and long-suffering ex-wife respectively.
However, the movie’s biggest sin is how senseless the investigation turns out. Witness cross-examination and fingerprint analysis could have solved the case fairly early. Instead, the police go with hunches and questionable psychological assessments. Director David Raymond’s inability to make sense of his own script is something else – the single interesting aspect of the film, predators targeting underage girls in social media, is dumped very early on in favour of a sub-par serial killer procedural.
The best thing about Night Hunter is the length. At 97 minutes, the nonsensical plot moves fast enough for some of the obvious shortcomings to go unnoticed. The real mystery here is not the identity of the killer, but who greenlit this movie. Also, who knew there was so many Brits working in Minnesota law enforcement?
