The Lincoln Lawyer (Sunday, March 20, 2011) (17)

On paper The Lincoln Lawyer seems like a great film noir in the grandest Hollywood sense, but it is executed so poorly it just comes off as a really terrible film.

Mick Haller is the eponymous advocate, who gets his name because he rides around Los Angeles in a Lincoln Town Car (seriously - that's all the name means). It seems he has an office (at least he has an assistant), but he never spends time there. Instead he rides around town going from one court house to another and from one client to another. He has a driver, apparently because his license was suspended at some point in the past, but he has his license back now and still uses the driver mostly - except for the middle act when the guy is mysteriously not around. Whatever.

He's sent to meet with a rich-boy client, Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillippe), who is being charged with assaulting a girl who turns out to be a prostitute. Roulet says he didn't do it, and his story is very convincing, however when Mick gets to digging - or gets his investigator, Frank (William H. Macy), to dig - they find that he's not the boy scout he seems to be. Mick's ex-wife, Maggie (Marisa Tomei) is a district attorney (of course) and they get into fights about their daughter, have sex now and again and share confidential information with one another. That's just what exes do, dontcha know.

I really appreciate how much of an ode to Hollywood noir this really is, with silly, random gunfights, views of obscure parts of Los Angeles and rich boys getting into trouble for their bad habits that involve unseemly elements of town, but the script here (written by John Romano, based on a book by Michael Connelly), aside from the basic plot points is really terrible. The dialogue sounds like it was written for a teenybopper soap opera and the story is so inert, it's no surprise when twists come or when characters flip.

There's absolutely no style to be found at all, as most of it takes place in daylight (that's an interesting update of noir if there's no way to get interesting shadows and lighting that gave the genre its name) and in a shity Town Car from the 1980s. Oh yeah - the stupid car that inspired the title is a late-model Town Car - because somehow Mick wouldn't care to buy a new car or something. Why not call it the Mercedes Lawyer or the Land Rover Lawyer? Is the American auto industry in such shape that this guy's heap would be its salvation?

Most of the acting here is terrible, but the actors aren't really working with any good lines. It seems much more like a high school drama club performance of a noir than any real movie with professional players. It's really badly directed (by Brad Furman). I guess this film serves the purpose of how to make a bad film noir with only bad choices. Film students can dissect each scene looking at what Furman does and lean how to do the opposite. That would probably make a pretty good movie!

Stars: 1 of 4

The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Tuesday, December 21, 2010) (159)

So this is the third of the Swedish movie adaptations of the Stieg Larsson Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books. Unlike the other two movies, this one really doesn't stand at all on its own.

It opens minutes after the second film closes (well, really the whole film is a 150-minute epilogue to the second film) with Lisbeth being medivac'd to a hospital where she has to recover from injuries sustained after trying to kill her father and half-brother (who she hates). She goes to the hospital and then is arrested for attempting to murder her father. She then contacts Mikael Blomkvist (of course) and give him her whole life story (which I feel like we've heard a few times before).

Blomkvist gets his sister, a public defender of some sort, to defend Lisbeth. The main witness for the prosecution is Dr. Teleborian, the psychiatrist who ran the orphanage she was sent to at age 12, and also the man who raped her and organized mental evaluations saying she was unfit to live without monitoring. Then there's some very boring stuff about him saying she's still schizophrenic and making up all this rape stuff and her maintaining her innocence.

Basically this is a very, very long and boring courtroom drama - but where the evidence is so strongly based on one side and the other side is clearly held together with spit and duct tape. There is no conceivable way that Lisbeth could be found guilty (even considering how much she's suffered at the hands of the 'system'). We know well that what she's saying is true and that the prosecution has no evidence aside from Teleborian's dodgy testimony.

There is a ridiculous segment for about 15 minutes where the doctor is saying that her assertions that she was raped by her guardian (which we saw in the first film and saw at least one other time in the second film on video) are entirely made up and not true. All her lawyer needs to do is show the video of her being raped and then the whole case for the prosecution would fall apart. Somehow the Swedish trial system is different from most western courts and there is no discovery or anything, so when the lawyer finally plays the video, everyone is totally shocked by its contents and realizes she's telling the truth. It's really not very good drama.

On top of this, there is almost no action to speak of in this film. What was fun in the first movie, and sorta fun in the second movie, were the chase scenes (hey - it's an action movie, right?). Here there are basically no chase scenes and they're replaced by very dialogue-heavy scenes of people talking about stuff we already know well.

It is clear, after seeing the trilogy, that the first movie stands on its own and is a fun action movie. The second and third movies are really two parts of what is effectively a secondary story (well, they also deal with Lisbeth, but they're mostly unrelated). In the end, the first one is the only film really worth seeing; the second and third films are not really worth seeing. If anything, see the second and not the third. She goes free at then end. Boring.

Stars: 1 of 4

Conviction (Saturday, October 30, 2010) (143)

Conviction tells the true story of Kenny Waters who was wrongfully convicted of murder in the early 1980s and how his sister, Betty Anne Waters got her G.E.D., then went to college and then got her J.D. so she could fight to get him exonerated. It falls in line with A Civil Action and Erin Brokovitch, books/movies based on amazing court cases that all end happily (if boringly).

So in this one, Kenny (Sam Rockwell) is a loser from the Massachusetts outback who gets in bar fights and is well known for acting out in his hometown. One day there is a murder and it is pinned on him. He says he's guilty and his sister Betty Anne (Hillary Swank) knows he is, so she begins fighting for him. She is married with two kids and in her mid-30s or so.

Along the way she meets a chick named Abra (Minnie Driver) who is also a bit older as a law student than the other kids in class. They become friends. At some point they get the Innocence Project involved and find out that there is no DNA evidence. They also find major amounts of corruption and malfeasance in the local sheriff's office and the county DA's office (that was Martha Coakley, the woman who lost Ted Kennedy's Senate seat to Scott Brown).

There is not much to this movie or the story itself. It seems pretty open-and-shut the way it's presented. He was fingered as the murderer by a cop who had a grudge against him; he had a record so he was easy to convict; 20 years later when DNA testing gained legitimacy he was exonerated. I guess there's some inner drama with whether Betty Anne would be able to pass all her tests and get her degrees, and later about whether she'd be able to recover the evidence that had blood on it, but there's not much tension through most of the film.

The best thing in the film, though is the remarkable performance by Juliette Lewis (really!) who plays a strung-out meth head who testified in 1983 that Kenny had bragged to her about the murder, but now is recanting her testimony, saying she was coerced into saying it. She is really remarkable in the small role. She's totally pathetic and disgusting looking, has a perfect accent and it totally, totally believable. For me this is honestly one of the best supporting performances of the year. Brava, Juliette!

Director Tony Goldwyn gives us pure vanilla here. There is no texture or particular style to speak of really. It's a totally forgettable movie.

Stars: 2 of 4