zaterdag 5 april 2014

Reasonable Doubt (2014)

Genre : Crime/Thriller
Country : Canada

Cast :
Samuel L. Jackson : Clinton Davis
Dominic Cooper : Mitch Brockden
Erin Karpluk : Rachel Brockden

Director :
Peter Howitt

Summary
Up-and-coming District Attorney, Mitch Brockton is involved in a fatal hit-and-run, but Clinton Davis, is found with the body and charged with murder. Believing that Davis is innocent, Brockton is compelled to throw the trial. Soon after, Brocton's perfect life begins to unravel as he realizes that the man he set free is hiding a secret that will destroy him.

My opinion

It looks like you just fucked up our reasonable doubt here, Mitch

Mitch Brockden ( Dominic Cooper ) has a perfect life. He is a rising star in court. A phlegmatic lawyer who can plea strongly and emphatically and who never loses a case, as he convincingly told his colleague. He has a beautiful wife and an adorable newborn daughter. The future looks rosy. The winning of another case in court is an excellent reason to go and celebrate this with colleagues. After a night of tequila hoisting, he doesn't carry out his initial plan to take a cab and drives home carefree with his own car. Along the way he fears being arrested by a police patrol and in a panic turns into a side street where he suddenly slams into someone. Under normal circumstances, you would call 911 and assist the man until they arrive. However, Mitch decides to just call 911 and leave the victim behind in a terrible condition. Abnormal in reality. For the further progress in this movie it's applicable. What's going to happen when someone is doing the very thing, that he shouldn't do ? The next day Mitch finds out that a certain Clinton Davis (Samuel L. Jackson) has been arrested as a suspect .

And this is the beginning of a typical, bland thriller. A trifle, nobody would have cared about if it wasn't for Samuel L. Jackson to play in it. The subject has been repeatedly used and this is a story without any real inspiration and with completely ridiculous improbabilities. Perhaps Mitch is a top lawyer, but him growing into a true detective who discovers in a rather simple way evidence, that apparently is hard to find for seasoned detectives, beats everything. I must admit that the twists in the story aren't evident and they tend to put you on the wrong foot.

You would assume that Mitch would be wriggling in every way so they wouldn't catch him. It was also a mystery to me why he still bogged in this matter, as he could get away unscathed from it. The moments he is confronted with questions and situations, making him realize that he's the one who committed the crime, is nicely developed. Yet the improbabilities keep piling up. I had no idea that escaping from a police station was so dead simple. And there's nobody who comes up with the bright idea to track the call. I assumed that all telephone traffic is tapped in such a station.

Jackson apparently feels comfortable playing a crazy psychopathic maniac. "Meeting Evil" and "Oldboy" are the last movies I've seen in which he performed. In both movies, he also plays a ruthless deranged person who doesn't mind to provide some additional victims. Still I sometimes had the feeling that he didn't perform in here devotedly. He used his famous "Samuel L. Jackson" attitude again, but was woeful in the final minutes with the lamentation full of self-pity. The ending wasn't surprising and a real disappointment. The name Dominic Cooper basically meant nothing to me and I didn't recognize him at the first moment. He turns out to have played a significant role in "Abraham Lincoln : Vampire hunter". Not a memorable movie for me, so apparently I've erased it from my memory. His performance was generally satisfactory, except some really strange facial expressions sometimes. But both couldn't save the vacuous and rudderless story, regardless of the effort they made.

The most positive thing about this movie is the duration. It's a short 80-minutes movie, so you don't have enough time to get annoyed. You want to see a typical non-intellectual semi-soft without any suspense thriller, then you should definitely give it a chance. But I'm pretty sure there are better movies to choose from and get value for what you spend.