Copycat 1995

a solid thriller. Sigourney Weaver does a pretty fantastic job as the profiler who got damaged.

There's this copaganda storyline that I think pads the movie too much on top of the fairly solid police drama. Kyra Sedwick, I mean Holly Hunter has this thing about being in control. More specifically her partner is a loose canon. In the opening scene they're doing a training exercise and this killer cop in the making kicks in a door, shouts "Police Freeze" and then IMMEDIATELY fires 15 shots one after another in to a training dummy, then pauses looks at Holly Hunter's MJ and then fires a 16th shot. His shots aren't precise they're all over the place as MJ criticizes rightly it's an insane amount of bullets and given that the subject would have had zero time to react it's... just insane. The guy has a screw loose. This guy is also our love interest. He's the only cop who treats MJ the lady cop like a person he doesn't use terms that even in 1995 were still sexist and old fashioned. He looks at Sigourney's Helen Hudson as someone who is sweet rather than as everyone else, including Helen, sees her, a broken dickish person. I thought the precision setup was going to be left alone. I thought it was just about establishing some reparte. It was effective in setting up MJ as a no-nonsense cop who deserved to be leading the case. It was enough imo. But there's a scene of random violence in Chinatown and the debate from the opening between MJ who thinks you should shoot enough to put the villain down and Ruben who thinks you should shoot enough to make sure they never get up is settled by the movie showing MJ use her technique in a picture perfect manner. She hits a hostage taker right in the shoulder as she said she would, He even drops the gun as she says he would and yet still for reasons that aren't explained don't make any sense and defy logic, this villain who has taken a cop hostage in a police precinct, has taken a bullet to the brachial nerve and is lying down in a police station filled with cops who were watching him can use his other hand reach across his own body pick up the gun just to shoot the hostage anyway. That hostage? Ruben Goetz and the lesson is learned. MJ's methods don't work. It was wrong to be concerned about killing people by accident, about worrying about the investigation, about showing lack of impulse control, about considering whether someone is surrendering, about whether you might get sued for wrongful death, about the karma of killing someone. None of this matters in the movie because she was "wrong" and a cop got killed. No matter that her superiors try to tell her she did the right thing and just got the wrong outcome. That's true but the movie isn't interested in that. No the movie wants our main character to have learned her lesson. This is her punishment for choosing not to kill. Which is why in the final confrontation she doesn't hesitate. She pops one in the shoulder and then keeps shooting, somehow this superman after taking 4 bullets is still capable of aiming his weapon and so we get to see the satisfying headshot with accompanying triumphant score to seal the deal.

Now there's no need to consider the practicality of shooting the subject in the shoulder to aim for hitting a specific nerve cluster. That's mostly movie nonsense the real considering is about restraint. In real life police are trained to shoot someone so they go down. The real restraint is about when to pull out your weapon and when to fire. But the copaganda of this movie is that cops that show restraint lead to dead cops.

Outside of this ridiculously over the top plotline I liked this movie. Sigourney as I said basically killed it. I didn't recognize Holly Hunter doing her best Kyra Sedwick's The Closer imitation (yes I'm aware this movie came out much earlier). I liked both our main female characters and i think even Ruben was interesting. I think more could have been done to enhance their relationships. The sorta gay but never confirmed, but he was attacked in the gay serial killing scene Andy was almost fleshed out enough for a secondary character but I would have liked to see HOW Helen relied on him and what their relationship was like a little more. There's a hint that Ruben is a playboy and MJ suggests he's into young bimbo types which didn't jive with his flirtatious relationship with Helen. You have to really work hard to infer whether Ruben and MJ were more than work partners or if it was just her jealous ex-boyfriend, also a cop in their department, Nico being paranoid. I think there was room to cut out the jealous ex-boyfriend who you work with storyline entirely and that would have left some runtime for flesh out the rest of it. I mean we already have her tough as nails boss Lt. Quinn who barely respects her as a woman. It felt a bit excessive at times to watch Nico try to mark territory too.