Night Hunter
Stanley Tucci and Ben Kingsley give it their all in this brooding thriller, but poor Henry Cavill struggles with the leaden script
A string of missing girls. A hellish basement lair. A disaffected cop with a young daughter of his own, and a too-obvious suspect who is not all he seems. Night Hunter knows exactly the kind of cold, brooding crime thriller it wants to be, but it struggles to carry out the plan effectively thanks to a leaden script and a story that undervalues its most interesting parts.
The problem with attempting terse, Bogartian dialogue is that if you don't tune it to perfection, it comes out flat and stilted. Stanley Tucci and Ben Kingsley throw the full weight of their character acting talents against the writing and manage to wrestle some value from it. Poor Henry Cavill, left stuck in the spotlight with the bulk of the worst lines, is reduced to a series of perfume advert frowns and left with a performance so one-dimensional that it reads more like an SNL parody than a real character.
When it grasps at larger themes later on, it feels even more lost in the dark.