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100Intelligent and crackling with crisp, provocative visual energy, Copycat, the new thriller starring Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter, is so creepy and dangerous-feeling that it's like a knife edge pressed against the jugular.
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88It creates original characters - Hudson and, especially, the little dynamo M. J. - and makes them more important than the plot. We care, and that's the key.
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88With its rare mixture of intelligent plotting, flawless acting, and start-to- finish tension, Copycat is a force to be reckoned with.
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80Ending is on the conventional side, more so than anything else in the picture , but script by Ann Biderman and David Madsen keeps the tart surprises coming throughout most of the picture with only occasional lapses into red herrings and artificial manipulation.
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75Copycat is as steady and reliable as a pulse and as exhilarating as a surge of adrenalin.
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75Aside from some effective suspense sequences, the film's strengths lie in the relationship between the heroines, which is well developed and plausible by genre standards.
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The movie is, in short, a trash conundrum. What nearly redeems the movie is its acting.
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70The screenplay for Copycat, by Ann Biderman and Jay Presson Allen from a story by David Madsen, is otherwise so crackling good that character development threatens to eclipse the actual crimes.
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70Copycat is satisfyingly tense, but the disgusto factor is balanced by its obvious theatricality--neatly captured in the contrasting performaces of Weaver and Hunter, the one playing neurotic standard poodle to the other's tightly wound terrier. [6 Nov 1995, pg.86]
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70Jon Amiel, who previously directed "Sommersby," delivers a taut, gripping thriller and, with the help of his accomplished leads, succeeds in camouflaging some of the mammoth holes in Ann Biderman and David Madsen's otherwise intelligent and inventive screenplay.
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50Copycat, despite two tough-babe leads to kill for, flies in more directions than scattered kitty litter. [27 Oct 1995, pg.02D]
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50It's an occasionally entertaining ride, although one fraught with numerous logical holes.
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50The acting is capable and the suspense is effective at times, but the gore is grisly and the climax is surprisingly hokey.
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50By having Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter play the maniacs' feisty antagonists, the filmmakers seem to believe that they've made a significant feminist statement, the movie's two hours-plus of almost continual sadistic abuse of women notwithstanding. Even in an industry known for self-delusion, that is quite a feat.
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40It must be hard for actresses as unconventional and gutsy as Weaver and Hunter to find scripts worth making. Although this offers them both meaty parts with plentiful neuroses and snappy lines, it is otherwise a completely mechanical load of old cods.
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40Copycat, directed by Jon Amiel ("The Singing Detective", "Sommersby"), means to be a Greatest Hits album of atrocities. A sick mind is a terrible thing to waste. [13 Nov 1995, pg.120]
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40The plot would seem more ingenious if the movie itself didn't copy so many other thrillers (notably "The Silence of the Lambs"), and if it weren't so easy to spot every twist half an hour in advance.
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25There's are nagging problems with the script, which feels like it has lost a few pages during its rewrites. Instead of an orderly, inexorable pressure of events, we get a surfeit of red herrings, followed by the rather uninteresting killer simply stepping out of hiding.
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10Holly Hunter and Sigourney Weaver, a cop and a shrink, are the main trackers, but so little is done in Ann Biderman and David Madsen's script to give them or their colleagues or even their prey interesting human dimensions that the overall ambience is chiefly pornographic.