Perhaps the best of the 'late' Columbo movies. I enjoyed the 'police work' that involves a team of real cops working together, a captain, a station house... the usual Columbo formula makes hims a sort of outsider and the other police vague walk on figures. The opening is NOT the 'murder reveal' formula and so we go on a suspenseful journey that involves a great deal more emotion than just watching Robert Culp or Jack Cassidy squirm - frankly the formula was getting threadbare by then. Columbo is still recognizably Columbo but with an extra level of intensity, emotional involvement in the story and an easy aura of authority that the other cops and even the captain respects. It is both creepy and suspenseful and you must remember that the previous year The Silence of the Lambs had come out and surely that inspired the writers. I cannot think of another outright psycho as the Columbo quarry, it was about time.
Review of No Time to Die
