Reptile

Following the brutal murder of a young real estate agent, a hardened detective attempts to uncover the truth in a case where nothing is as it seems, and the answers all seem to lead right to his own front door.

Will Grady, and his girlfriend Summer, flip foreclosures on expensive homes in the Scarborough area under the watchful eye of his mother, Camille. They’re successful, young, and beautiful, but there seems to be some tension brewing in the relationship. Then one day, Will goes to meet Summer at a house that she’s showing, and he finds her very, very, very dead, the victim of a brutal murder.

Enter Detective Tom Nichols. A hangdog-faced detective, he left Philly after a corruption scandal, and moved to Scarborough, as his wife—and sometimes detective-sounding board—Judy, has family in the area. The pair are currently remodeling their kitchen. They also both enjoy square dancing, and because of this, even though he’s from Philly, Detective Nichols is known to the vaguely threatening group of guys in the Detective squad as Oklahoma.

There’s a lot of suspects in Summer’s murder.

There’s Grady, of course, a prettyboy mama’s boy who seems like the type who could fly off the handle easily, and who also has a new girlfriend almost immediately. He and his mom are definitely shady when it comes to their real estate business too. Plus, he is the one who found the body… But then, it could also be Summer’s soon-to-be ex-husband Sam, a jealous and creepy weirdo local “artist” who is known to secretly cut stranger’s hair to use in his art. But then there’s also Eli, who hates the Gradys after they screwed his dad on a land deal. He also just generally looks like a wild-eyed and unwashed lunatic. Plus, he has a habit of creeping around other people’s houses in the dark, and intimidating them.

If you’re a regular watcher of Dateline—and I am—then you know that any one of these people seems plausible as a suspect.

The general problem is, Reptile is too precious with its details, with the kitchen stuff, the square dancing, Tom and Judy’s marriage, Tom’s past as a cop. It focuses too much on the things that are supposed to color the characaters’ lives, which then end up just cluttering up a story that is supposed to be littered with clues. The filmmakers don’t seem to understand that procedurals need to get more focused as they go, not more convoluted. Instead, it's all over-written and exaggerated, and it eventually becomes clear that none of it was done for the purpose of of being a Red Herring either.

And because the film is so weirdly cluttered, you often end up seeing clues where none are intended, so you automatically assume that there’s more going on than there is, that the answer won’t be the obvious one, so you end up overthinking it as you’re watching, but then… it turns out to be the most obvious answer.

Which is a let down.

The reason why Summer was killed is a little more clever than you’d expect, but still, having the reveal be the overall most expected answer… that’s a little disappointing. I wish this film was half as clever as it thinks it is.

Also, if there’s one plot device used by no-talent bullshit writers that is more hacky than sending your character on a metaphor-laden dream/hallucination in order for them to confront and overcome their own personal inner demons, it’s using a dream to insert a shocking moment into your story. If your character is suddenly killed in a tense situation, and then they sit up in their bed, sweaty and gasping, you’re a hack, and you need to just hold down the delete button until that whole scene is gone.

So, yeah, in the end, Reptile is a disappointing effort.

Despite this, there’s still Benecio Del Toro front and center in this film, turning in a phenomenal performance as the classic world-weary detective, a man who has seen it all before, and now only wants the life of peace and quiet that seems to be deliberately avoiding him. The film is too exaggerated, too convuluted, but he plays it very sublte, it’s all in the slouching posture, and the sad eyes. It’s good stuff, and really deserves a better movie. I’d love a for Del Toro to get a series like Natasha Lyonne, a Columbo style detective show where he sighs heavily, solves a crime, and then takes a picture of an interesting kitchen faucet to show his wife for their kitchen remodel.

The square dancing is a weird detail too. It makes sense that Del Toro’s character would be known as Oklahoma around the office because of it, because it is a very weird hobby for a person in 2023 to engage in, especially in a suburb town outside of Portland, Maine, especially as it appears that a large section of the town also enjoys this weird-ass hobby that is usually reserved for old people who are long dead.

And mainly, I’m left wondering… why?

Why would you choose square dancing as his hobby? And then to feature it so much, but not tie it into the plot? It’s not just weird because who the fuck square dances in 2023, it’s also weird because square dancing is very much a tool of white supremacy in America history.

Henry Ford was a bigot and anti-semite, otherwise known as an average white American, and he absolutely hated jazz, which he considered to be black people music. But more than Jazz, he hated Jewish people. Much like Hitler (and most of the modern day GOP party, as well as many Centrists in America too), Ford believed that Jewish people were planning to take over the world, and that they were using Black people to do it, and that jazz was the main tool with which they would corrupt the sweet (white) Christian children of the world. In 1921, he wrote:

“Many people have wondered whence come the waves upon waves of musical slush that invade decent homes and set the young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons. Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.”

Coincidentally, Ford’s view on race now forms the basis of the “Democratic Plantation” theory beloved of GOP/Trump and “oh so reasonable” White Centrist voters all across this country, the people who only love Israel because of the role it plays in their bible. It claims that liberals and Democrats are the ones who are the “actual racists” and that they only support social programs to manipulate people of color into not voting Republican.

So, as a result, Ford poured millions into an effort to bring back square dancing, as well as other primarily Anglo-Saxon activites, because he believed that this would provide a healthy alternative to the unwholesome influence jazz and the Jews had over the sweet, good, and innocent (white) youth of America.

And this is why we all had to spend a week square dancing in gym class as kids.

Which brings me back to Reptile…

Why is square dancing such a weirdly prominent, but ultimately unimportant to the narrative, part of this film? I’m not saying that there’s definitely a particular motive there, but still, it’s such a god damn weird out-of-left-field choice, not just for modern day society in general, but the setting and the characters too. It’s just so incredibly incongruent with the modern world. Plus, like I said, it doesn’t tie into the story in any meaningful way

So… Why?

It could potentially be a commentary of cops, maybe… Cops are White Supremacists largely focused on upholding White Supremacist Systems, so it makes sense that they participate in the favored activities of White Supremacists? Maybe? I don’t know, but if that’s the intent, it doesn’t offer much more than that, and having watched the film, that honestly didn’t feel like that was the point to me.

So, I don’t know.

On top of that, why is the kitchen remodel so heavily mentioned as well? And why is the moment where Tom confronts a possible affair going on between the handy man and Judy so featured, especially when there’s no real resolution?

Why?

Yes, a good character is made up of many different facets, and the influence their life has on them should be reflected in their actions in the story, but again, after watching the film, that wasn’t the point here, not in any really noticeable way, at least. It’s not like his love of square dancing led him to be able to see a pattern no one else could, or his wife’s possible infidelity led him to understanding a motive, or his interest in kitchen remodeling led him to finding a clue on the faucet handle.

It was just… clutter, and so much of it, that it leads to you over-analyzing an otherwise pretty simplistic and obvious story.

Increasingly hollow, and too long, Reptile loses focus wandering around in the deep weeds that it deliberately planted itself, ultimately losing the audience by the time it gets around to revealing the obvious answer to its central mystery.

Disappointing.