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    ‘Reptile’ Review: Unusual Suspects

    Benicio Del Toro plays a detective investigating a suburban homicide in this overstuffed thriller.The tortuous crime thriller “Reptile,” streaming on Netflix, at times feels like the unwise attempt to cram an entire season of a cops-and-perps show into just over two hours. The movie, peopled with a near-bottomless supply of unsavory rogues, tracks the aftermath of a grisly murder by trailing the policemen on the case. Domenick Lombardozzi (of “The Wire”) is even featured among the crew — although his presence is merely another reminder of the sharper stories this movie aspires to replicate.Set in an overcast marsh town in Maine, the movie opens on a couple facing friction: Will (Justin Timberlake), a real estate mogul, and Summer (Matilda Lutz), an agent at his company, converse tersely while readying a house for a showing. The sheeny manor is all stainless steel and vaulted ceilings, a home that, in its moneyed facade and alienating interior, offers an apt metaphor for the pair’s domestic strife.Once Summer is found stabbed to death in a for-sale property, however, the movie shifts into procedural mode. We swivel to center on Tom (Benicio Del Toro), a detective who’s fresh meat on the local force; he and his wife, Judy (a convincing Alicia Silverstone), decamped to the hamlet following a scandal in Philadelphia. Working under the stony police captain (Eric Bogosian), Tom presents as a weary but devoted enforcer of law and order. “There’s only one thing I love almost as much as I love you,” he smolders, less to Judy than at her, “and that’s being a cop.”Thank goodness for that fidelity, for this particular homicide soon proves a Pandora’s box of treachery and pretense. The poised Summer, during her short life in suburbia, managed to mingle with a legion of kooks and creeps, including her ex-husband, Sam (Karl Glusman), an artist fond of stealing human hair for his sculptures, and her glum confidante, Renee (Sky Ferreira), who seems to resent her pal’s success. That’s not to mention the bratty, well-to-do Will, whose resting pout face is only partially the fault of Timberlake’s restricted acting range.In his first feature, the director Grant Singer (who wrote the screenplay with Benjamin Brewer and Del Toro) demonstrates a knack for building suspense. In one stylish sequence, Tom dials a mysterious number that could be the key to cracking the case. As he listens to the tone, Singer cuts to multiple characters reaching for ringing phones. The small scene oozes with Hitchcockian tension.The trouble with “Reptile” is that this impressive moment-to-moment control does not extend to the contours of the broader story, which the writers overstuff with clumsy twists and contrived devices. Once the film gets around to revealing the culprit, we have already lost interest, enervated in the face of a movie that, like an overeager snake, bites off far more than it can swallow.ReptileRated R for coldblooded murder. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘No Sudden Move’ Review: Don’t Forget the Motor City

    Don Cheadle and Benicio Del Toro star in Steven Soderbergh’s new film, a Detroit-set period thriller with a lot on its mind.On an ordinary Monday morning in Detroit, three masked man show up at a handsome brick house on a tree-lined street. Once inside, two of them hold a mother and her children at gunpoint while their colleague accompanies the man of the house, a midlevel accountant at General Motors, on an urgent errand. It’s the mid-1950s, which means the cars are big and curvy, the men mostly wear hats and neckties, and the women are mostly wives, secretaries or mistresses.Nobody involved — not the intruders or their victims — knows entirely what’s going on. The viewer of “No Sudden Move,” whose comparatively pleasant task is to connect a whole lot of intricately arranged dots, is in good company. The guys who stay behind in the house, Curt (Don Cheadle) and Ronald (Benicio Del Toro), have been hired by an impatient fellow named Mr. Jones (Brendan Fraser) for the supposedly simple job of armed babysitting. Before the morning is over, they learn that other, more elaborate agendas are involved: the petty grudges of organized crime bosses; the voracious ambitions of the automobile industry; the imperatives of American postwar power and prosperity.And also, hovering over all of it, the preoccupations of the director, Steven Soderbergh. In the current phase of his dizzyingly protean career, Soderbergh is both an intrepid genre filmmaker and an impassioned practitioner of the cinema of ideas. “No Sudden Move,” from a script by Ed Solomon (who wrote all three “Bill & Ted” movies), is for the most part a tight and twisty against-the-clock crime caper with an obvious debt to Elmore Leonard (and a family resemblance to Soderbergh’s great Detroit-set thriller “Out of Sight”). It also has things to say — at times a little too speechily — about race, real estate, capitalism and power.Those things are interesting, but maybe not as interesting as the people who say them. The story is about the sometimes lethal pursuit of cash and information, but the film’s single greatest asset is its cast. Curt and Ronald, small-timers who are skilled and smart but also out of their depth, are the focus of the action, which means that you spend a lot of time with Cheadle and Del Toro as they act out a high-stress — and yet low-key — buddy comedy.Ronald, a bit of a drinker and a bit of a racist, moves through the world as if dancing to a sad melody that only he can here. Curt, just out of prison with sorrows of his own, has the quick wit and jumpy intensity of a survivor. Each has fallen afoul of a local crime boss, which is bad for them but lucky for us, since the big shots are played by Ray Liotta and Bill Duke.There’s more, notably David Harbour as the pathetic G.M. accountant and Amy Seimetz as his seething wife. An entire melodrama of marital malaise and sexual secrecy is folded into their scenes, even as “No Sudden Move” suggests a Coen brothers movie with a sincere social conscience in place of the ambient cynicism. Most of the characters are semi-competent players in a game that is rigged against them, and you hope that at least some of them will play their bad hands well enough to break even.The movie itself is nearly flawless in its professionalism, which is both a virtue and a limitation. The costumes (by Marci Rodgers) and production design (by Hannah Beachler) create a museum-quality panorama of the Motor City in its glory years, even as the script points out some of the cracks in the burnished surfaces. The precision and grace of the actors I’ve already named extend all the way through the ensemble — through Jon Hamm (as a skeptical lawman), Frankie Shaw (as a G.M. secretary with skin in the game), Julia Fox (as Ronald’s paramour) — to at least one potential surprise I don’t need to spoil.In keeping with the automotive themes, everything runs like a well-oiled machine, which is also to say that a crucial, hard-to-define element — of soul, of spontaneity, of messiness or inspiration — is missing. The object that sets the plot in motion is a set of highly coveted blueprints, which at one point needs to be torn in half. The schematic for “No Sudden Move” remains perfectly intact, and the thing itself works pretty much according to the specifications. A consumer-rating agency would give it high marks for safety and efficiency, but it never leaves the showroom.No Sudden MoveRated R. Bloodshed and salty talk. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More