All signs point to favorable

David Toschi, movie star of the San Francisco Police Department, is the fast-driving, quick-talking, quicker-thinking cat who inspired Steve McQueen's character in

Bullitt

, Michael Douglas' in

The Streets of San Francisco,

and Clint Eastwood's in

Dirty Harry

.

In Zodiac, Mark Ruffalo, rumpled, shaggy and suggesting Columbo more than screen star, plays Toschi, lead investigator of the murders claimed by the shadowy self-regarding figure who called himself the Zodiac. In the early '70s the serial killer held the Bay Area in his grip of fear.

Ruffalo has the same relation to prior screen versions of Toschi that Zodiac has to prior films by David Fincher, maker of Seven, Fight Club and Panic Room. Best-known for pulse-pounding thrillers with sufficient splatter for the bloodthirsty, Fincher has made Zodiac as procedurally meticulous as All the President's Men - and as enthralling.

It's not the sociopath who intrigues Fincher here. He's obsessed by the obsessives who want to solve the cipher that is the Zodiac as though he were a homicidal anagram or a killer Sudoku. As Fincher mordantly suggests, the fanatics who struggled to decipher the Zodiac are no less his victims than those the murderer actually stabbed and shot.

Such obsessives naturally gravitate to police investigation, investigative journalism and filmmaking - jobs in which it is the professional's task to piece narratives out of threads of story. Fincher spins these threads into a taut thriller, one without everything neatly tied together.

Accordingly, the central figures in the film are a pair of policemen and a pair of journalists. Toschi and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) are the SFPD partners. Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) are the San Francisco Chronicle veterans. James Vanderbilt's solid screenplay is based on Graysmith's pulpy book.

The film opens with fireworks in the night sky on July 4, 1969, over Benicia, the East Bay town where the Zodiac made his first credited attack (actually in December 1968).

Cinematographer Harris Savides, longtime associate of Gus Van Sant, shoots in high-def rather than film and cloaks this scene with shadowland creepiness punctuated by Donovan's psychedelic dirge "Hurdy Gurdy Man" on the soundtrack. In this permanent midnight, how can anyone identify the killer of a couple in a car on Lovers Lane?

In cryptograms sent to Bay Area newspapers and police, the Zodiac claims credit, demanding the papers publish his letters or he'll strike again.

Less concerned with the blood left by the Zodiac than the bloodhounds hunting him, Fincher jumps to urban workplaces and paints their denizens in vivid detail.

Zodiac runs long, about 21/2 hours, but it also runs fast, at a heart-pounding pace over four major characters and 22 years. There's not an ounce of fat on any sequence or performance.

Fincher doesn't rely on haircuts and clothes to telegraph the '70s. Rather, he elegantly inventories uniquely period sounds, from the music of Santana and seagulls to that of rotary phones and computer Pong. The textured visual and audio elements get us into the characters' heads and spaces.

As do the exceptional actors, especially Ruffalo, Edwards and Downey, who vanish into their dogged characters. It takes the puppyish Gyllenhaal longer to establish the right tone for the nerdy Graysmith, but by mid-movie, he finds his voice.

Zodiac is a reproach both to those dedicated to unscrambling The Da Vinci Code and to those hooked on forensic crime shows where all the evidence leads to a tidy conclusion. That Zodiac's manhunt is inconclusive makes it all the more haunting.

Produced by Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer, Bradley J. Fischer, James Vanderbilt and Cean Chaffin, directed by David Fincher, written by James Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith, photography by Harris Savides, music by David Shire, distributed by Paramount Pictures.

Running time: 2 hours, 28 mins.

Robert Graysmith. . . Jake Gyllenhaal

Insp. David Toschi. . . Mark Ruffalo

Paul Avery. . . Robert Downey Jr.

Insp. Armstrong. . . Anthony Edwards

Melvin Belli..........................Brian Cox Parent's guide: R (violence, profanity, mature themes)

Playing at: area theaters

EndText