At The Movies: To Catch A Killer shoots blanks, Sisu slays

To Catch A Killer (NC16)

119 minutes, opens on Thursday
2 stars

The story: Amid the festive fireworks on New Year’s Eve in Baltimore, Maryland, an expert sniper up in a penthouse fells 29 random revellers. Shailene Woodley stars as beat cop Eleanor Falco, who is requisitioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to help profile and track down the terrorist.

Why does FBI agent Geoffrey Lammark (Ben Mendelsohn) pick a rookie like Eleanor to partner him in the high-pressure manhunt of To Catch A Killer?

Eleanor is alert and motivated, just the sort of flinty females Woodley plays (The Divergent Series, 2014 to 2016). She shares Lammark’s impatience with law-enforcement politicking.

But where Lammark perceives in her troubled psyche a latter-day Clarice Starling uniquely capable of understanding the killer’s mind, the audience sees only a personality blank.

The heroine’s inner demons so integral to the story go unexplained, and her vaunted intuitive skills are mainly to eavesdrop on the findings of her co-investigators. She will have to do better if the lambs are to be silenced.

This psychological thriller procedural by Argentine writer-director Damian Szifron has undercooked characters and a dubious plot that eventually finds Eleanor and the lone-wolf assassin (Ralph Ineson) in an improbably civil discussion of social isolation and right-wing conspiracies. The political commentary is contrived.

Much more hard-hitting are Szifron’s two tense and intricately staged mass shootings. The first is the sensational prologue and the second erupts mid-movie in a shopping mall.

They are a reminder of America’s chilling epidemic of gun violence, and of the film-maker’s promise as an Oscar nominee for Wild Tales (2014) before this disappointing Hollywood debut.

Hot take: A rising director and a reliable star are hampered by a limp script – their serial killer drama shoots blanks.

Sisu (M18)

91 minutes, opens on Thursday exclusively at The Projector
4 stars

The story: In 1944 World War II-era Northern Finland, a solitary gold prospector trekking 800km across the stark tundra encounters a Nazi death squad who seize his bullions and leave him for dead. Bad move, because the old coot is a legendary former commando with no intention of surrendering his bounty, much less dying.

The title, Sisu, is a Finnish word not easily translated, encompassing stoicism and perseverance.

It is Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) in action, and this outlandishly, brutishly entertaining revenge western filmed on location for €6 million (S$8.9 million) is all monomaniacal action as the grizzled hero pursues his gold.

The Nazis, led by a brutal SS Obersturmfuhrer (Aksel Hennie), try repeatedly to get rid of him via beatings, shootings, hangings, bayonets, grenades, drowning and land mines, and he turns these manoeuvres against them and takes them down.

Aatami is a berserker the locals call The Immortal. He single-handedly destroyed 300 Soviet soldiers during the Winter War – so what, to him, is killing 30 evil fascist goons?

His dog, his horse and a truckload of female sex-slave hostages are the only other characters in the bare-boned story.

Finnish writer-director Jalmari Helander – the twisted mind behind the very un-Yuletide horror Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010), which also starred Tommila – structures seven chapters, each a set piece that propels Aatami’s odyssey by topping the previous in creative hyper-violence.

The gonzo performance by Finnish actor Tommila, in his mid-60s, is not for the squeamish. He has more battle scars than Rambo and less talk than John Wick. He is as indestructible as the Terminator, cool like Clint Eastwood in his 1960s Dollars Trilogy film series and an inspiration to seniors.

Hot take: Destined to be a midnight cult classic.