More Holly Hunter completism. I'm starting to think that she really did just have three good roles (in The Piano, Broadcast News and of course voicing Elastigirl). Here she clones Jodie Foster from The Silence of the Lambs with Sigourney Weaver taking some time away from her aliens to show us how much Anthony Hopkins brought to these 1990s psycho killer flicks. Dermot Mulroney channels David Duchovny to Hunter's Scully more successfully than whatever he was trying to do in About Schmidt. Will Patton is marginally less creepy than usual.
But the title is in fact about the style of serial killer William McNamara: the climactic murder apes Harry Connick Jr.'s earlier effort while the others are (putatively) drawn from American reality. These blokes are doing their things in a long-gone San Francisco — and did the Zodiac die of old age? — where it's almost beyond the good guys not to expire before the necessary.
I guess this genre is adjacent to horror. The dialogue was rife with non sequiturs and fragile egos. The music (by Christopher Young) was very annoying, and some scriptwriting genius decided that The Police's Murder by Numbers has it over Talking Head's Psycho Killer or Elvis Costello's Psycho (etc). We get a lesson drawn from Dirty Harry: don't shoot to disable, shoot to kill. It's just not very good.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half mystifying stars and a plot summary. Injecting meaning where it simply doesn't fit. Exorcising horrors. Janet Maslin. Both observe that it was overshadowed by Se7en at the time.