Three stars. Rated R, for profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang
Some stories, despite an engaging
premise and a solid opening act, eventually work themselves into an unfortunate
corner.
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| When Hank (Robert Downey Jr., left) reluctantly agrees to help defend his father (Robert Duvall, center) against a murder charge, he first must undo the damage unintentionally caused by inattentive local attorney C.P. Kennedy (Dax Shepard). |
Sadly, that’s the case with The Judge, a well-cast and tightly
plotted legal thriller that gets considerable mileage from the tempestuous,
high-octane pairing of Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr., as a severely
estranged father and son.
Tightly plotted, that is, until
the film wears out its welcome with an increasingly contrived and deeply
unsatisfying third act ... by which point director David Dobkin’s 141-minute
drama has become at least half an hour too long.
Dobkin certainly draws excellent
performances from his stars and their supporting players: no problem there. But
his writing experience hails from broad slapstick (Wedding Crashers, Fred Claus)
and popcorn action flicks (Jack the Giant Slayer, R.I.P.D.), which hardly
makes him ready for narrative territory inhabited far better by the likes of
John Grisham, Michael Connelly and Scott Turow.
Dobkin shares the writing chores
here with scripters Nick Schenk (Gran Torino) and Bill Dubuque, and the result eventually feels overcooked: a
high-concept proposal likely sold via a tantalizing 25-word pitch that lacked a
solid punch line. Hollywood is littered with the forgotten corpses of such
projects: promising at first glance, but ultimately disappointing.
And I’m fairly certain most
viewers will be quite unhappy with
the way this one ends.
Downey’s Hank Palmer is a slick,
big-city defense attorney who makes no apologies for employing every possible
legal trick to get his wealthy but clearly guilty clients off the hook.
(“They’re the only ones who can afford me.”) Although Hank is troubled by
neither scruples nor morals, his surface glad-handing masks an arrogant jerk
with a miserable home life shared with a hotsy-totsy younger wife (Sarah
Lancaster, in a fleeting and thankless part) poised to divorce him, thus turning
their adorable little girl — Emma Tremblay, as Lauren — into a reluctant
bargaining chip.
Then, suddenly, a crisis: the
death of Hank’s mother, which brings him back to his bucolic (and frankly
gorgeous) home town of tiny Carlinville, Ind. (actually Shelburne Falls, Mass.).
He abandoned this scene years earlier, no longer able to withstand the
belittling treatment from his father, Joseph (Duvall), who happens to be the
community’s long-presiding judge.
The reunion is hardly cheerful,
despite the obvious bond Hank feels for older brother Glen (Vincent D’Onofrio)
and younger brother Dale (Jeremy Strong), both of whom remained in Carlinville.
Hank and his father immediately
fall into their old, long-established pattern of mutual contempt and rapacious
verbal sniping, much to the chagrin of everybody else. It’s a well-established
fact that people, no matter how old they get, often revert to a powerless
adolescent dynamic when in the presence of their parents, particularly if the
setting is a childhood home.
And if the relationship is
long-frayed to begin with, the situation is far worse: The unresolved issues that
have been held at bay, in the shelter of the well-established lives we’ve built
elsewhere, pop right back to the surface.
