Copycat (1995)

(On TV, October 2000) Oh yawn; another film starring a devious serial killer. We’re seen so much of those by now that the best a new one could hope to do is to maintain our attention for its duration, which -fortunately- is what Copycat manages to do, despite problems here and there. Though Sigourney Weaver gets top billing, the real star here is Holly Hunter, who somehow manages to look sexy and smart (unlike in, say, Crash) as the lead investigator of a series of murders. The film proceeds with a certain effectiveness and rarely a dull moment. There are disputable choices (such as to take out a major character halfway through) and silly computer stuff (self-erasing files! Super video-editing programs! Ultra-high-speed lines!), not to mention a rather predictable ending, but it’s not all that bad.

(Second Viewing, On Cable TV, August 2022) Revisiting Copycat after watching many more 1990s thrillers in the thirty years since their release is cause for a re-evaluation. Oh, I still don’t think that it’s a particularly great movie: it wallows a bit too much in its own fascination for serial killers, and there’s an arbitrary aspect to its plotting that either feels chaotic or scattered. But taking the entire crime thriller subgenre of the 1990s in consideration (a subgenre that I rather miss now that it’s gone from the big screen), it does a few things quite right. I did like Holly Hunter’s performance as a flawed but dogged police officer. Sigourney Weaver reigns over the film as a capable FBI profiler driven to reclusion after a violent attack. Some sequences are unnerving, Harry Connick Jr. is out-of-persona creepy as a psychopath, while the plot plays elaborate games with the serial-killer corpus of facts. It also looks, after accusations of plagiarism regarding 2018’s The Woman in the Window, like a much better film than its own… copycats. I normally can’t stand serial killer films, but this one managed to keep my attention to the (bleak) end in its own minor-key way. It probably helps that we don’t get as many serial-killer movies now than before, and for good reason: according to statistics, it does seem as if there are far fewer serial killers now than in the 1990s. The possible explanations for this decline are fascinating (and I’m still putting two bucks on the lead-poisoning hypothesis), but that’s a piece of good new that is not often remarked upon.