| Ordell Robbie | 1.5 | Unconvincing Experiments |
Copycat Killer is well interpreted and beautifully photograph. But it ain't enough to make a great thriller. The screenplay is well written and the Reservoir Dogs-like flashback in the middle of the movie functions well. On the other hand, the movie wants to criticize real TV but it isn't as deep as Battle Royale; the character who's the crime's brain is a cliché, the one of nazi-like sadistic guy who loves art and good wines. Moreover, when the guilty one is discovered, the movie doesn't know how to finish oscillating between fantasy, boring description of what happened afterwards and a last scene so smooth in a bad way that it looks like bad Spielberg. But the worst is that Morita Yoshimitsu ruins what could be a fairly good thriller by gratuitous visual experiments : come and go of zoom lenses, Dogma like cameras, useless internet commentaries contrarely to the ones in All About Lily Chou Chou, dark frames surrounding the image, image superpositions. During the transition between the flash back and the final, the camera is quieter for a short while. What a pity caus' if we would have had not a japanese Seven but a correct thriller.
To conclude, the huge success of Copycat Killer in Japan can be explained partly by the fact that it's not looking cheap -Japanese people's main reproach to their cinema- and some qualities of its screenplay. If this ain't enough to make an interesting movie, at least it's good for japanese film industry (which is in crisis although it's less known than for Hong Kong caus' of the recent and justified festival buzz about japanese arthouse movies).
