Avis des critiques

Del Toro is still a formidable screen presence, though everything around him is so stale that it makes little difference, no matter how much the actor teases out more twisted depths in his character or environment. What is there is stretched thin over a mind-numbing two-and-a-quarter hour runtime, with little to show for it.

[Reptile] foregrounds Del Toro... in a way that makes you want more of him. But also, regrettably, less of movies like “Reptile,” which tries to match its star’s unpredictable magnetism with a forced eeriness, only growing more ponderous and unfocused, like a case getting colder.

[Reptile] struggles to develop a confident personality around [Benicio Del Toro], ultimately coming apart at the seams... its biggest misstep is its failure to understand that procedurals need to get narratively tighter and not just more convoluted.

[Benicio Del Toro] carries this sometimes convoluted and derivative thriller into three-star territory with an absolutely mesmerizing and authentic performance... It’s authentic, grounded, stunning work. Even when the material is the stuff of B-movie guilty pleasure.

The trouble with “Reptile” is that this impressive moment-to-moment control does not extend to the contours of the broader story, which the writers overstuff with clumsy twists and contrived devices.

Reptile is a good-looking, engaging B-movie made with uncommon intelligence. Music video director Grant Singer’s feature debut is no perfect object, but it is decidedly, and often successfully, aspiring to be something more than just toss-off streaming content.

Rather than push boundaries in terms of imagery or editing, Grant Singer’s accompaniments provide little more than Instagram-filtered framing for the persona-first pop stars who’ve rendered his services... Singer aims for the bleak, gritty texture standard to the genre, and winds up closer to the result of an anonymous recommendation generated by the algorithmic tags of “Bleak, Gritty.”

[A] tough, ambitious but flawed feature debut... the lack of a clear, satisfyingly dramatic reveal smudges the ending; it’s as if Singer and his co-writers had lost interest in the gothic-horror aspect of the murder as a rational conspiracy emerges... [But] the bulky physical presence of Del Toro himself gives the film its momentum and force.

“Reptile” comes on as “smart,” but the movie, for all its sinister-ominous-music atmosphere, is opportunistic enough — or maybe just enough of a consumer product — to swallow its own premise, if not its own tail.

Reptile just feels wayward and listless... [it] winds slowly and deliberately to its not particularly surprising conclusion.

Much of [Netflix's] output has been heavily underwhelming and this latest offering is no different, the only adhesive element Benicio Del Toro’s natural screen gravitas... Singer’s best directorial decision in a film filled with clumsy ones is giving Del Toro as much real estate as possible.

“Reptile” doesn’t know how to reach the profundity it desires. After the first hour, the film drones on (and on) around bad clues and worse assumptions. Where is the rhythm? Where is the touch of mood or tone?