Hangman (2017)

There's a specific kind of sadness that comes with watching a genuinely great actor sleepwalk through a film that isn't even worth their B-game. Hangman is that sadness, bottled and stretched to feature length. It's not just a bad thriller. It's a boring one, and that's a far harder sin to forgive.

The premise is your standard serial killer procedural: a detective, leather jacket firmly in place, haunted past quietly simmering, gets drawn into a cat-and-mouse game with a killer who fancies himself a puzzle-setter. You've seen this a hundred times, done far better, with far more energy. Hangman brings nothing new to the table. Not a fresh angle, not a clever subversion, not even a memorable set piece. It's a checklist masquerading as a movie. Cop with demons? Tick. Killer with a gimmick? Tick. Race against the clock? Tick. Daughter in peril? Oh, go on then. Tick.

The riddles the killer leaves behind are supposed to feel chilling and cerebral. They feel cringe-worthy. The dialogue is clunky in that particular way that makes you wonder if anyone read it aloud before they filmed it. Scenes that are meant to crackle with tension fizzle out before they've even found their feet, and the plot holes are big enough to drive a van through. The side characters are entirely forgettable, the pacing is a mess, and the whole thing reeks of a production that was assembled in haste and released before anyone stopped to ask whether it was actually any good.

And then there's Pacino. Al Pacino, who once held the screen in Insomnia with a quiet, creeping dread that genuinely got under your skin. The man who was so magnetic in Cruising that even a deeply strange and troubled production couldn't fully dim him. Here, he growls his lines, stares at case files with furrowed intensity, and does his best to inject some weight into scenes that simply don't deserve it. He's not phoning it in exactly. He shows up. He tries. But there's only so much charisma can do when the script is this lifeless. You can see the effort, and that almost makes it worse, because it throws into sharp relief just how little the film around him is trying.

This is what people mean when they talk about the straight-to-digital era of a once-great career. It's not that Pacino suddenly lost the ability to act. It's that he started accepting work that gives him nothing to act against. Hangman is a gritty 90s-style serial killer thriller in the same way that a knock-off designer bag is the real thing. The shape is roughly right. The feel is completely wrong. Everything that made those films work, the atmosphere, the moral murkiness, the sense of genuine dread, is absent here, replaced by a kind of hollow mimicry that never convinces for a second.

There's genuinely nothing here to recommend. No standout performance, no moment of inspiration, no scene you'll be thinking about the next morning. It's the cinematic equivalent of a meal that fills you up without tasting of anything. The kind of film you finish and immediately forget, except that you don't quite forget it, because the disappointment lingers a little. That's the Pacino effect, I suppose. Even when he's in something this mediocre, some part of you expected better, and the gap between expectation and reality stings.

Skip it. Put on something that actually earns your time. Two stars, and I'm being generous.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2017  | Watched: 2025-08-27

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