When we first meet Benicio del Toro's grizzled, seen-it-all detective Tom Nichols in Reptile, the gloomy new murder mystery on Netflix, he's questioning the boyfriend of a woman who has just been brutally murdered.
The boyfriend seems understandably shaken, and willing to cooperate; he's not a likely suspect. But Nichols isn't so sure; he suggests to another cop that they make the boyfriend take a polygraph.
They wouldn't even need to hook it up, he says; just connect the man to a device called a lie detector, then see how he reacts. It would be a power play on the part of the cops, not to produce clear forensic evidence but to try to shake something out of someone via what amounts to psychological bullying.
As it turns out, Nichols isn't even the movie's bad cop; he's just a thorough investigator with a suspicious streak and a willingness to lean on potential suspects. Both of those tendencies drive him as he uncovers a complex web of corruption in a film that, as Peter Bonilla of the MIT Free Speech Alliance recently remarked, sometimes plays like a game of "civil libertarian bingo."
The plot is more than a little convoluted, and the movie takes its time weaving together its various narrative threads. But at heart, it's a story about police corruption.
There's a major thread, for example, about civil asset forfeiture, with police planting drugs on houses so they can be seized and sold off to a shady real estate developer.
There's another bit involving dubious bite mark evidence, a largely debunked evidentiary practice that police have long used to prop up dubious cases.
In another subplot, there's a police officer who has started his own private security firm, paying other cops handsomely for what amounts to easy make-work assignments—and perhaps some other, less legal activities as well.
And there's a sequence in which Nichols kills a suspect during a shootout and is then put up for an honorific by his fellow officers. It's the wrong suspect, of course, and the goal is to keep Nichols from investigating further.
In other words, it's a parade of law enforcement ethics abuses and police self-dealing, with cops taking advantage of their special privileges, from forfeiture to access to evidence lockers, to bolster their own bank accounts at the expense of the general public.
The movie's knotty screenplay doesn't do as good a job of making all of this clear as it might have, and the slow-burn story sometimes struggles to maintain momentum. But it's captivatingly shot and pleasingly moody. Indeed, its murky, paranoid atmosphere sometimes seems designed to highlight the ways that police take advantage of the fact that it's simply difficult to understand how seemingly unrelated practices are connected. In its best moments, Reptile makes clear that police corruption thrives in the shadows, bolstered by public confusion.
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