Make no mistake, you’ve already seen the new Netflix-y murder-mystery-procedural Reptile — but why not watch it again? That is, if you haven’t written it yourself in your dreams. Talk about a modern-ish genre that desperately needs a shake-up: You get the unhappy cop who’s just about had it, a bloody murder with a seemingly simple solution, unearthed hints that suggest there’s a bigger secret story involving the Rich and the Powerful, the disinterment of old newspaper clippings or legal documents, a few knockings on screen doors, the brawls and shootouts when the conspiracy becomes obvious, and the semi-sacrificial climactic confrontation.
Along the way, lowlife red herrings are bandied about, the cop’s marriage is strained by the job or by suspicion, and the institutions that hold our society together are exposed as corrupt and malignant. It’s the core of every cop bestseller of the past three decades or more (Michael Connelly, Lee Child, David Baldacci times ten thousand) and many dozens of near-identical streaming originals. You know the pattern like you know the wallpaper facing the toilet in your home.
Del Toro makes a great detective paradigm, doing a good deal by doing very little.
But when that tired old ditty comes on the car radio, sometimes we happily hang with it. Director Grant Singer’s first movie, on a resume consisting mostly of music videos, Reptile doesn’t hurt going down — and what is there about a professionally executed, paint-by-numbers genre spritz that can’t kill a Friday night? In this iteration, Benicio Del Toro is the transplanted small-town cop and member of a tightly bound couples-dinner detective fraternity that includes his captain (a weary Eric Bogosian) and the obligatory fat bulldozer asshole (Domenick Lombardozzi), whose effusive lack of couth is the first familiar red flag. The hero’s saucy wife (Alicia Silverstone) sometimes helps with the investigative head work, while flirting with the hunky…
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