Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I wanted to like this so bad, but no... just no. So many problems. Al Pacino's acting is subpar, and what the heck is happening with his weird, sometimes Alabama, sometimes Louisiana accent? WHY? It makes no sense in the film. Why is this even a hangman game? The killer is giving the clues AND choosing the letters? What sense does it make? How is it a game, if only he is playing it? It's really just a race of the 24 hour clock, and he could achieve that with riddles, and spare us the hangman game that never goes anywhere. I mean, it COULD have worked, if the cops had chosen the letters, and the hangman was built through incorrect choices. That would have opened the door to creative styles of kills, based on the part of the hangman drawn in. Also, they make a point of explaining that Pacino's character does crossword puzzles, and in Latin none the less, and yet that's never connected?! Sure, he knows the puzzle at the very end, when he's STARING AT THE WALL, but he never figures it out?! In fact, no one in the movie ever seems interested in solving the hangman puzzle! They NEVER discuss it. It's bizarre. I could go on and on. The random dad's suicide that is never connected to anything in the plot. Now that's suddenly a motive, two decades later, and with no connection to a hangman game? The cop badge numbers are carved into the desk why? Maybe you could argue Pacino's is there because he was the responding officer, but why the other cop's? I mean, seriously... this kind of dangling plot hole is a constant. Don't even get me started on the reporter with a teeny tiny, yet strangely traumatic, scar who has absolutely no purpose in the movie. Nothing connects in this film. It's like a few writers got together, played pin the tail on the plot, and at the end of a drunken night, submitted the screen play and said "but Al Pacino will star" and got it approved based only on that. Then, to put the final tail on that donkey said, "but do it in a truly awful Louisiana drawl!" Hard pass.