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THE POSTCARD KILLINGS
Director: Danis Tanovic Cast: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Famke Janssen, Cush Jumbo, Naomi Battrick, Ruairi O'Connor, Joachim Król, Steven Mackintosh, Eva Röse, Lukas Loughran, Dylan Devonald Smith, Sallie Harmsen, Denis O'Hare MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:44 Release Date: 3/13/20 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 12, 2020 One solid twist does not a good thriller make, especially when that twist occurs around the midway point of the story. When it happens at that point in The Postcard Killings, the story's sense of tension deflates, and the rest of the movie desperately tries to compensate. The premise for Andrew Stern and Ellen Brown Furman's screenplay (based on a novel by James Patterson and Liza Marklund) involves a serial killer on the loose in Europe. The most recent victim, murdered with her new husband in London, is the daughter of a New York City police detective named Jacob Kanon (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). While grieving and waiting for the whole of his daughter's body to be recovered, Kanon discovers a connection with another pair of murders in Madrid—a newly married couple killed, mutilated, and posed (Director Danis Tanovic shows the aftermath with clichéd camera trickery), with the killer sending a postcard to a local journalist days before the murders. While Kanon obtains surprisingly easy access to and even participates in police investigations across the continent (Other killings occur in Munich, Sweden, and Brussels), he also teams up with Dessie (Cush Jumbo), an American reporter working in Stockholm who receives one of the postcards, and his ex-wife Valerie (Famke Janssen) waits in New York for the plot to need her. Meanwhile, Sylvia (Naomi Battrick) and Mac (Ruairi O'Connor), Americans on vacation in Europe, meet and keep running into Pieter (Dylan Devonald Smith), who's very interested in the couple's travel arrangements. The investigation plot is routine and formulaic (Kanon even has a map decorated with obvious questions about the murders), but its juxtaposition with the subplot featuring the American couple at least gives it a sense of doomed momentum, since we seem to witnessing the first steps of an inevitable crime. Without saying too much, there is another pair of murders, but it's not exactly how we expect it to unfold. From there, The Postcard Killings falls into another routine, with a country-jumping game of cat-and-mouse, and tosses in some overblown psychological analysis (There's some not-too-subtle political commentary, too, about borders and sexual norms that's undercooked, simplistically reactionary, and wholly contradicted by the end). With its best card played, the movie simply runs out of any sense of innovation in its plot mechanics, and the rest is just a mechanical slog. Copyright © 2020 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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