Night Hunter, 2018, 98 mins, Amazon Prime
I think I may be done with ‘new’, or modern-day, movies, and that I should possibly retreat to those 1940s- 1970s films made when, you know, they knew how to make films. Film-makers today, they just don’t know when to stop with all the nonsense. Why can’t they stop the faster, louder, darker, edgier, the whole more, more, more bullshit that infects what passes for film today, I’m just so tired of it. Even if a film seems to have an interesting premise, with a decent cast etc, the guys writing and producing it just can’t help but ruin it, so lost in the entertainment industry maze of more shocks, more twists and surprises as if that’s the only way to hold viewer attention. In this case, the once-promising opening degenerating into something that gets sillier and sillier. Its like they are perpetually terrified of viewers reaching for the channel button on the remote, or believe viewers won’t stay for an honest to goodness drama without regular, hysterical twists of fate.
Tonight we had the choice of a 1940s Hitchcock film I’d never seen, or this. I was attracted by the cast -Henry Cavill, Ben Kingsley, Stanley Tucci, Alexandra Daddario… sure, there was a time that a cast list like that might promise some kind of quality, but those days are long gone. Thespians gotta eat, or pay for that new sports car, so a gigs a gig, I get it. Anyway, we were tired, long day after a long weekend, I figured save the Hitchcock for a day when I’m sharper, and maybe that was the right choice – but really, it doesn’t feel that way right now.
So Night Hunter is about a serial killer, a devious and ultra-intelligent abductor and rapist of women who has been operating for years- Hannibal Lector with a twisted sex drive, basically, who outwits and surprises a police department at every turn – its Silence of the Lambs by way of Seven, but as usual these days it isn’t enough to just rip-off better movies, the film-makers instead have to do it bigger, louder, darker. Consequently there are plot-holes galore, leaps of logic glossed over in an instant, bizarre twists so out of left-field its like they come from an entirely different movie. The final twist/revelation is so preposterous it leaves a massive credibility hole in what passed for the plot that it beggars belief.
I counted thirty producer credits at the end of this movie. Thirty. That’s thirty pieces of the production budget spread across thirty voices, thirty different opinions. I’m not sure there were that many speaking parts in the whole bloody film. How the hell does it take thirty producers to make a movie? Is that how films are made these days? How can it possibly not end in a film that is such a mess as this one?