Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is back in Canada all week covering the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. We wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing coverage of TIFF 2023, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
I’ll say one thing about Grant Singer’s sprawling neo-noir Reptile that you’re probably not expecting (or maybe you are), at least based on the film’s synopsis: It made me laugh more often than Dicks: The Musical did, and often for the reasons it intended. This is, after all, a movie about the brutal murder of a real estate agent in a small… New England (?) town, the efforts of one decent cop, still healing from a long-ago betrayal and beset by the legions of corrupt fellow officers that surround him, to get to the bottom of it all, no matter where the investigation leads and who it implicates. The answer lies in Benicio Del Toro, who takes this lead role as Nic, the only good cop in Atlant- I mean, “Insert Your Own Unpronouncable Town Name Here, Massholes,” and gives him a series of Colomboian quirks that would make Peter Falk give him a thumbs up from whatever mai tai joint he’s haunting in heaven. It is a long and boring film, with few other respites from the tedium, but Del Toro, for whatever reason, is just captivating.
Perhaps it’s because Del Toro is the perfect modern neo-noir protagonist at this stage in his career. This isn’t a genre he’s particularly unfamiliar with – you can go all the way back to the early ’90s and find good examples of him working with, say, Ed Harris in China Moon, to say nothing of his current-century work in Way of the Gun or Traffic or Sin City or the Sicario films – but it’s weird as hell that we got a Vince Vaughn-led season of True Detective before del Toro got himself his own Fincher-lite, complete with desaturated color palette and THUNDERING revelations witnessed by a person behind a computer screen.
Reptile operates best as a kind of parody of those sorts of movies, in which those moments of browser-based discovery are quickly undercut by a shot revealing that Nic’s actually looking at touchless kitchen faucets like the one he saw at the crime scene. This, no less, is a recurring gag, and it’s one that actually doesn’t stop being funny every time that it’s brought up: See, the dude is in the middle of a kitchen remodel with his wife (Alicia Silverstone, who compliments del Toro’s energy well), and he just really wants to get it right. I would gladly watch Nic go to his local Ace Hardware and talk shop with the clerks for hours: Del Toro’s just this weirdly charming, being the kind of person who just doesn’t give a fuck about certain things but is particularly anal about kitchen faucets.
In fact, I’d wager that the two-odd hours he’d spend at that Ace would be more compelling and dramatic than the central narrative thrust of Reptile, which is sort of like Cop Land with a realtor’s license. See, our murder victim was both the girlfriend and business partner of a local realtor (Justin Timberlake), whose family has a long and storied history in this suburb of not-Atlanta. He’s a fishy fucking dude, and Nic smells a potential culprit as soon as he sees the guy. But his police chief (Eric Bogosian), who also happens to be one of Nic’s poker night boys, steers him in the direction of the victim’s ex, who ran drugs and had some contact with her in the days before her death. That line of investigation ends pretty quickly, and the department celebrates another closed case. But Nic’s thoughts linger: What about that other weirdo (Michael Pitt) with long, greasy hair? What about the bite marks on the victim’s hands? What about the fact that one of his boys is going into the private security field and keeps trying to give him Rolexes and other things? As these threads become more complexly woven, he begins to collapse, and he’ll eventually have to face the fact that he might have trusted the wrong people.
Describing Reptile as laconic would be like calling an emphysema-suffering slug slow and out of breath: Obvious and yet still an understatement. I’m sure Ryosuke Hamaguchi will be genuinely envious of how Singer achieved this time dilation-like effect because, good lord, you could have told me this movie was four hours long, and I would have believed you (I’m kidding, nerds). The stakes are absurdly low, the mystery is just not particularly compelling, and the supporting cast isn’t well-drawn enough to be intriguing. For a vibes-based movie, it lacks the kind of intrigue or style to keep one’s attention on a strictly aesthetic level, and when combined with the threadbare nature of the entire narrative, Reptile feels positively spartan, a thriller without any thrills, a neo-noir that’s more of a neo-grayscale Instagram filter.
Singer’s an accomplished music video director and has ample amounts of style – one only needs to see his videos for The Weeknd to get all the proof required – and it’s genuinely a shame that this particular story doesn’t give him a chance to do more visually, given how locked in it is to the genre’s modern-day tics. On the other hand, this lethargy makes del Toro all the more vivid, with his subdued banter and quirks the only signs of life around, and it also gives the film’s major action beat – an interruption during a climactic gunfight – an absurd comedy. Seriously, that bit at the end will live in a certain amount of infamy because it is ridiculous in an unexpected and cliche-shattering way, and I have no clue if it was a good choice or not. All I know is that for a brief 30 seconds, Reptile was as good as Del Toro is and as good as it could have been.