High Crimes: Movie & DVD Review (2002)

(Originally published 2002)

The new Carl Franklin movie, "High Crimes," is one of those glossy, well-acted potboilers that doesn't aim high enough.

Moments fly thanks to the talented cast, but since the film eventually steamrolls into a middling mess of courtroom cliches and dumb plot twists that no actor can surmount, the experience is ultimately as weak as the poison in Botox--though without the smooth and pretty results.

The film, which Yuri Zetser and Cary Bickley adapted from Joseph Finder's novel, stars Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman in their first screen pairing since 1997's "Kiss the Girls," but by the time the last reel has played, there will likely be those who wish Judd and Freeman had kissed up to a better script.

They certainly deserve it.

The film gets off to a promising start with Judd as Claire Kubick, a fierce, high-powered attorney for a high-powered law firm whose high-powered life is about to be hit by a high-powered wrecking ball.

During an innocent evening of holiday shopping in San Francisco, Claire and her sensitive, doe-eyed husband, Tom (Jim Caviezel), are ambushed not by the crowds in the stores, but by the FBI.

Apparently, Tom's real name is Ron Chapman, something that shocks Claire to the sole of her Manolo Blahniks. Now, she must deal with the knowledge that the love of her life and the father of her unborn child allegedly went on a killing spree in a Salvadorian village in 1988, leaving nine women and children dead in his wake.

Is Tom..err..Ron a murderer? Or could it be that the killing was actually committed by Maj. Hernandez (Juan Carlos Hernandez), a shifty little man with a mysteriously droopy left eye who might, in the end, only be a decoy for the real person responsible here--brigadier general William Marks (Bruce Davison).

With the help of Charlie Grimes (Freeman), a recovering alcoholic with lapses in sobriety that add conveniently to the story but have zero grasp of real life, Claire fights the good fight in spite of being beaten up, harassed and threatened by an evil band of military personnel determined to bring her to silence.

Without a genuine surprise or, worse, a moment that doesn’t feel as if it was first distilled and then diluted for the approval of a test audience, “High Crimes” is actually rather low, a film whose cast proves the only heartbeat in a story that was dead on arrival.

Grade: C