Copycat

CinemaSerf

Sigourney Weaver is "Helen", a psychologist who has a major panic attack if she has to leave her apartment to fetch a newspaper from the corridor outside! She is, however an expert on what drives serial killers - having had a pretty near death experience with one earlier in her career - Harry Connick Jnr, no less. When a copycat starts to kill young women, she is drafted in by police officers "Monahan" (Holly Hunter) and her partner "Goetz" (Dermot Mulroney) and together they have to track down this masochistic individual before he strikes again. To make things more interesting, the killer starts to get in touch with them, to tease and goad them - he even gives them a name - but can they apprehend him before his spree continues unabated? It's an OK crime drama this, no better really. The cast work well enough, but the plot is riddled with holes that rather rob the thing of much jeopardy and provide for an ending that you can see from space. Sigourney Weaver does enough, and Hunter makes for quite a feisty and determined cop but the pace of this overlong feature is lethargic at best, with too many distractions in the story that render much of this quite tedious at times. Perhaps, had Jon Amiel tightened up the script a bit and cut out some of the unnecessary character development stuff, we might have been left with a more potent catch-me-if-you-can. As it is though, this is all pretty unremarkable.