High Crimes | Review

Franklin misses a couple steps in creating suspense flick.

After more than a decade since his brilliant One False Move, director Carl Franklin brings us the story of a husband with a past and his attorney wife who’ll do all she can to free him. Can you handle the truth? No, this is not some overwhelming courtroom drama à la A Few Good Men; this is a film about frame-ups, deception and protecting the ones we love. The real question- is this just another clumsy spoon-fed thriller/drama about gathering up all the clues and waiting for the big bang or is this an intelligent let you use your own noggin-show them but don’t tell them type of story?

High Crimes offers a promising storyline that gets mangled by a bunch of useless succession of pointless scenes and is perfectly matched by plenty of cumbersome character motivations. The prologue provides us with a sufficient amount of back-story to show the cozy union between the two, we are then thrown of the horse when the FBI arrests a man who has evaded capture for more than a decade. The double identity card is introduced and played out until the stories end with our heroine protagonist going ballistic through it all. Ashley Judd (Kiss the Girls) plays the emotionally strained wife who looks good in pajamas and also happens to be a tough lawyer who uses her stomping boots throughout the court system. Along for the ride is her sister played by Amanda Peet (The Whole Nine Yards) a useless character that provides the T&A that Judd doesn’t. The film’s most promising feature is the presence of Morgan Freeman (Nurse Betty) he plays the poorly written character of a lawyer referred to as the “Wild Card”, but instead of giving the details about his strong anti-military convictions and his court-room rebellious style we are subpoenaed with this battle with the bottle sub-plot which has been overdone one to many times in cinema. Jim Caviezel (The Count of Monte Cristo) plays the good-looking husband who can fool his wife with the stardust from his eyes.

Franklin inserts a little tension to ring up this drama into a more suspenseful mode, but the build up is not sharp enough, he leisurely inserts the intruder in and out of shadows and the routine defenseless woman returning home at night with her keys in hand predicament or car chases that end up with over-turned cars in ditches. The narrative isn’t any better with plenty of scenes that are pointless (what was the point of making the defendant fight inside a holding cell? or what was the deal in giving the protagonist a shiner) to the logical sense of the film and which act only as useless distraction. High Crimes frustrating finale drives the entire film into ground taking away the viewer’s pleasure with the whole pull the rug from underneath cheap confession, which is a director’s cheap method of telling the entire story within a one-minute flashback mode and instead of solidifying the film with a true high-octane moment it comes off looking like big aspirations turned into a failed deliverly of the goods.

Rating 1 stars