Review of Hangman (2017) by Juliankennedy23 — 01 Apr 2018

Hangman: A retired detective (Al Pacino) and a criminal profiler (Keith Urban) join forces to catch a serial killer who is using the children's game hangman as his leitmotif. An intrepid reporter (Britney Snow) has been assigned to tag along as the three try to solve the case while the victims pile up one every twenty-four hours. Can they solve the puzzle in time?

The Good: Al Pacino. While Keith Urban gives a solid performance considering the dodgy material Al Pacino takes it to a whole new level. For starters Tommy Wiseau has a more believable New Orleans accent than the southern fried nonsense Al is trying to pull off here. Whats more Pacino seems to change his accent scene by scene. Soon the most entertaining part of the movie is what accent is going to show up and what word is he going to add extra syllables to this time.

Pacino, to his credit, isn’t just in paycheck mode but actually gives a sense of world-weariness through facial expressions and ad-libs. Certainly, more character than the one-dimensional script would indicate.

As an example, our intrepid reporter Brittney Snow gives this insufferable and endless speech complete with fake tears about how hard it is to be a cop, how great cops are, and how she asked for this assignment so she could expose the greatness of cops to the general public. It’s the kind of scene you would expect in a John Travolta film about an electrical lineman. At the end of the speech, an incredulous Al Pacino ad-libs a weary yeah great whatever with only his facial expression that is simply the best thing in the movie.

The Bad: The script. The movie is one of those one step behind serial killer procedurals (Think Seven) where the cops have to guess the next victim using clues left behind at the previous crime scene. The fun of such films is that the audience is right there with the cops doing ye olde deduction.

The film simply never gives the audience information to follow along. Honestly, it never gives cops information either. The deductions are along the lines of “Why would he splatter the blood on the roof? Quick get me Central… Hello Central What is the victims birthday? Feb 1st, 1972? My god he is going to strike next at the Red Roof Inn on Route 72 in room 201 I need all cars headed there we only have minutes….” What??? Bonus points off in that at no point do the detectives actually try to solve the hangman game the killer leaves. Idiots.

The direction does the film little favors. The film is well shot (though it does contain a hilarious shot of our three leads emerging from the fog in slow motion as if they are off to fight Doomsday.) but the pacing never allows any tension to rise and seems to be there to cover the giant holes in the script. In the director's defense, I am not sure how one could have shot this without a rewrite and cutting some of the killings.

Or they could have cut one of the characters. Outside of her yay cops speech, Britney Snow seems to have no purpose in the film. We don’t need an audience surrogate since the film clearly could care less about its audience following along. We don’t need a love interest. We don’t need an example of really bad acting.(Sloane Warren has those honors hands down as the coroner. ) Why is she in the movie? What could we be missing? Gee, I wonder whom the serial killer will kidnap at the end of the film?

In Conclusion: This is a not a good film. Brintey Snow Sloane has zero charisma and screen presence, and there is little tension when most of the victims are random and unknown till they are found hanging around. There is a subplot where we need to keep it out the press as if daily lynchings in a mid-sized southern metropolis would ever go unnoticed. There is a sequel bait ending that makes no sense and is apparently there to anger the few audience members slackjawed enough to still be entertained at this point. As Al Pacino would say "Y’all need a better script if the stallions are going mount the mare down by da holla".