Rep­tile review – less ​“who­dunit”, more ​“who cares?”

When a music video direc­tor makes the jump to cin­e­mat­ic fea­tures, the expec­ta­tion is that while they may expe­ri­ence some tur­bu­lence in adjust­ing to the demands of nar­ra­tive, they can be safe­ly count­ed on to goose the form by car­ry­ing over the freer exper­i­men­tal­ism of shorts required only to com­ple­ment a giv­en song. But rather than push bound­aries in terms of imagery or edit­ing, Grant Singer’s accom­pa­ni­ments pro­vide lit­tle more than Insta­gram-fil­tered fram­ing for the per­sona-first pop stars who’ve ren­dered his services.

If not for the fleet­ing pres­ence of Sky Fer­reira, there would be noth­ing in the unre­mark­able thriller Rep­tile to sug­gest any note­wor­thy back­ground for its direc­tor, per­fect­ly at home in the func­tion­al point-and-shoot fla­vor­less­ness of straight-to-stream­ing pot­boil­ers. Singer aims for the bleak, grit­ty tex­ture stan­dard to the genre, and winds up clos­er to the result of an anony­mous rec­om­men­da­tion gen­er­at­ed by the algo­rith­mic tags of ​“Bleak, Gritty.”

Real estate stiff Will Grady (Justin Tim­ber­lake, now one decade out from his last good movie) has been hav­ing some inti­ma­cy prob­lems with his fiancée and part­ner, judg­ing by his shrugged-off advances in a house they’re try­ing to sell, but he’s still hor­ri­fied to find her man­gled corpse there lat­er that day. Did he do it, per­haps at the behest of his haughty, con­trol­ling moth­er (Frances Fish­er)? Was it the ex-hus­band (Karl Glus­man) with a haunt­ed look in his eyes sug­gest­ing some­thing sin­is­ter behind his soft-spo­ken demeanor? Or was it some seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed psy­chopath (Michael Pitt) glimpsed lurk­ing around the crime scene, his face creepy enough to count as prob­a­ble cause?

The detec­tive on the job is Tom Nichols (Beni­cio del Toro, who also coau­thored the screen­play), a lif­er ten­der with his under­stand­ing wife (Ali­cia Sil­ver­stone), but not so eager to yuk it up with his com­pa­tri­ots at a retire­ment din­ner for their com­mand­ing offi­cer (Eric Bogosian). Tom isn’t above juic­ing his month­ly take-home pay with unnec­es­sary over­time, and yet he looks askance at some malfea­sance from his fel­low boys in blue (espe­cial­ly Domenick Lom­bar­dozzi, for­mer­ly Herc on The Wire), hint­ing at past conflict.

In the one ​‘sur­prise’ con­tained here­in, these two strands of Tom’s life — his stumper of a case and the ten­sions back at HQ — turn out to be con­nect­ed, though a savvy view­er quick­ly intu­its that Singer wouldn’t be show­ing us all of this if they weren’t. A min­i­mum of cun­ning shapes his parcel­ing-out of clues, a thor­ough­ly ordi­nary inves­ti­ga­tion that achieves its unac­count­able two-hour-plus run time not with a par­tic­u­lar­ly dense mys­tery or pre­pon­der­ance of red her­rings, but by mov­ing from one plot junc­ture to the next very slowly.

The dirge­like pac­ing only makes a more tire­some drag out of a naïve cri­tique which ulti­mate­ly boils down to ​“some cops are bad, so lucky thing we’ve got the good ones to hold them account­able.” And Tom Nichols doesn’t even have much to rec­om­mend him for the hall of fame for his arche­type, undis­tin­guished with­out any unique qual­i­ties save his mut­ed delight at dis­cov­er­ing a touch­less, wave-acti­vat­ed faucet head for his kitchen sink.

The mate­ri­al­ism of police, a blue-col­lar pro­fes­sion that earns men with bad inte­ri­or design sense a white-col­lar wage, could’ve been a sta­ble peg on which to hang a noir-ish descent into the deprav­i­ty of greed. Alas, it’s just anoth­er day on the job for Tom in what feels like it should be the fourth or fifth sequel to a less tedious intro­duc­tion for the char­ac­ter, as if los­ing steam it nev­er had in the first place.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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