Everybody wants Atticus Finch until there’s a dead hooker in the bathtub.

The Judge

(2014)

(SPOILERS) Robert Downey Jr.’s non-Iron Man, non-Sherlock Holmes self-produced vanity project took a tumble at about this time last year. It probably left a few studio suits scratching their heads. This was the star in his cocky element (unlike Due Date), playing off one of cinema’s great actors (Robert Duvall), playing in a reliable genre staple (the courtroom drama). It isn’t so mystifying on actually watching the thing. The Judge is bloated, unfocused and manages to coddle the viewer with clichés while simultaneously inserting material if thinks might be a little edgy (but really isn’t).

Actually, scratch that. I was genuinely surprised by the scene in which Downey’s Hank Palmer must avoid slipping over in his ailing father Joseph’s (Duvall) shit, and then proceeds to help him clean himself up. This in a picture that is otherwise so shamelessly glossy and textbook in the narrative points it hits.

Warner Bros must be thanking their lucky stars that David Dobkin’s Arthur and Lancelot never went into production. Dobkin’s fine as an anonymous comedy guy (well… he is responsible for Fred Claus) but only Downey Jr. knows why he was thought to have the chops for a serious drama. His approach seems to be marbling the picture in Janusz Kaminski’s lush visuals (that light flooding the courtroom though; sheesh!) and allowing Thomas Newman to smother it with an emotionally tugging but banal score. Mostly the picture just meanders, never able to gather steam on a course that is constantly checking itself; is this a family saga, a romance, a murder mystery? There’s even a smattering of ill-advised adult humour as Hank frets over whether the young woman he copped off with when he got to town is in fact his daughter (it’s okay, she’s only his niece! But he’s still not telling his ex).

I think I had in mind Downey Jr. attempting to do a proper courtroom drama when I heard about the picture, à la The Verdict, but every element of Hank’s journey is tired and familiar. He’s that heartless rich lawyer without a shred of moral fibre (“And how does it feel, Hank, knowing every person you represent is guilty?”: “It’s fine. Innocent people can’t afford me”), a guy who pisses on an opposing prosecuting attorney’s shoes in the first scene, who is splitting up with his pert wife and is estranged from his curmudgeonly father. Don’t worry, though. He adores his daughter, so we know it will all work out fine in the end.

Just because material is familiar, doesn’t mean it can’t be fruitful; the rich city guy returning to the small town of his birth and rediscovering himself is evergreen in potential. It’s mostly squandered here, though. The obligatory old flame, as personified by the wonderful but underused Vera Farmiga, adds little to the proceedings other than expanding the running time unnecessarily to the two-and-a-quarter hour mark (this is where the Downey vanity vehicle bit comes in; it has to cater for any emotion he wishes to explore herein, including showing his abs).

There’s the crafty prosecutor (Billy Bob Thornton, running on autopilot, but who can blame him), the inexperienced defender (Dax Shepard, decent but doing his well-meaning doofus shtick) and the brothers; could’ve-been-a-ballplayer-if-not-for-Hank’s-dark-past (Vincent D’Onofrio, doing the nice guy) and learning disabled filmmaker Hank stands rock solid by (Jeremy Strong). The latter’s facility leads to overcooked nostalgia trip home movies.

The trial revolves around whether Joseph, on the night after burying his wife, ran down and killed a man he regretted letting off lightly 20 years earlier (who subsequently got out of prison and killed his girlfriend). None of the twists are sufficiently dramatic (it’s patently obvious Joseph hasn’t started on the booze again, and is ill when he forgets someone’s name, rather undermining Hank’s shit-hot credentials), and Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque’s screenplay even resorts to a big emotional bonding moment mid-trial as Joseph reveals just how much he loved his wayward son despite it all.

The Judge lacks balls. To paraphrase a question Hank asks his brothers, what line was Dobkin in when they were distributing testicles? He’s content to imbue the movie with a superficial veneer, only occasionally punctured by its stars, because that’s the only kind of movie he seems comfortable making. This is a picture with so little real inspiration, when it comes across a good line it has to put quotation marks around it (“Everybody wants Atticus Finch until there’s a dead hooker in the bathtub”). Downey Jr. is very much not stretching himself here, but he’s reliable, and he’s more than up to playing a scene opposite Duvall, who is the (only) real reason to see this.

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She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

You’re never the same man twice.

The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)
(SPOILERS) Roger Moore playing dual roles? It sounds like an unintentionally amusing prospect for audiences accustomed to the actor’s “Raise an eyebrow” method of acting. Consequently, this post-Saint pre-Bond role (in which he does offer some notable eyebrow acting) is more of a curiosity for the quality of Sir Rog’s performance than the out-there premise that can’t quite sustain the picture’s running time. It is telling that the same story was adapted for an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents 15 years earlier, since the uncanny idea at its core feels like a much better fit for a trim 50 minute anthology series.

Basil Dearden directs, and co-adapted the screenplay from Anthony Armstrong’s novel The Strange Case of Mr Pelham. Dearden started out with Ealing, helming several Will Hay pictures and a segment of Dead of Night (one might imagine a shortened version of this tale ending up there, or in any of the portmanteau horrors that arrived in the year…

‘Cos I’m the gringo who always delivers.

American Made (2017)
(SPOILERS) This is definitely more the sort of thing Tom Cruise should be doing, a movie that relies both on his boyish™ charm and at least has pretensions of ever so slightly pushing the envelope of standard multiplex fare, rather than desperately attaching himself to an impersonal franchise (The Mummy) or flailingly attempting to kick start one (Jack Reacher: Never Go Back); remember when Cruise wouldn’t even go near sequels (for about 20 years, The Color of Money aside, and then only the one series)? American Made is still victim to the tendency of his movies to feel superstar-fitted rather than remaining as punchy as they might be on paper (Made’s never quite as satirically sharp as it wants to be), but it at least doesn’t lead its audience by the nose.

Rejoice! The broken are the more evolved. Rejoice.

Split (2016)
(SPOILERS) M Night Shyamalan went from the toast of twist-based filmmaking to a one-trick pony to the object of abject ridicule in the space of only a couple of pictures: quite a feat. Along the way, I’ve managed to miss several of his pictures, including his last, The Visit, regarded as something of a re-locating of his footing in the low budget horror arena. Split continues that genre readjustment, another Blumhouse production, one that also manages to bridge the gap with the fare that made him famous. But it’s a thematically uneasy film, marrying shlock and serious subject matter in ways that don’t always quite gel.

Shyamalan has seized on a horror staple – nubile teenage girls in peril, prey to a psychotic antagonist – and, no doubt with the best intentions, attempted to warp it. But, in so doing, he has dragged in themes and threads from other, more meritable fare, with the consequence that, in the end, the conflicting positions rather subvert his attempts at subversion…

Two hundred thousand pounds, for this outstanding example of British pulchritude and learning.

The Avengers 4.18: The Girl From Auntie
I’ve mentioned that a few of these episodes have changed in my appreciation since I last watched the series, and The Girl from Auntie constitutes a very pronounced uptick. Indeed, I don’t know how I failed to rate highly the estimable Liz Fraser filling in for Diana Rigg – mostly absent, on holiday –for the proceedings (taking a not dissimilar amateur impostor-cum-sidekick role to Fenella Fielding in the earlier The Charmers). I could watch Fraser all day, and it’s only a shame this was her single appearance in the show.

By Jove, the natives are restless tonight.

The Avengers 4.17: Small Game for Big Hunters
I wonder if Death at Bargain Prices’ camping scene, suggestive of an exotic clime but based in a department store, was an inspiration for Small Game For Big Hunters’ more protracted excursion to the African country of Kalaya… in Hertfordshire. Gerry O’Hara, in his second of two episodes for the show again delivers on the atmosphere, making the most of Philip Levene’s teleplay.

Romulan ale should be illegal.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
(SPOILERS) Out of the ST:NG movies, Star Trek: Nemesis seems to provoke the most outrage among fans, the reasons mostly appearing to boil down to continuity and character work. In the case of the former, while I can appreciate the beef, I’m not enough of an aficionado to get too worked up. In the case of the latter, well, the less of the strained inter-relationships between this bunch that make it to the screen, the better (director Stuart Baird reportedly cut more than fifty minutes from the picture, most of it relating to underscoring the crew, leading to a quip by Stewart that while an Actor’s Cut would include the excised footage, a Director’s one would probably be even shorter). Even being largely unswayed by such concerns, though, Nemesis isn’t very good. It wants to hit the same kind of dramatic high notes as The Wrath of Khan (naturally, it’s always bloody Khan) but repeatedly drifts into an out-of-tune dirge.

I think we’ve returned to Eden. Surely this is how the World once was in the beginning of time.

1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)
Ridley Scott’s first historical epic (The Duellists was his first historical, and his first feature, but hardly an epic) is also one of his least remembered films. It bombed at the box office (as did the year’s other attempted cash-ins on the discovery of America, including Superman: The Movie producers the Salkinds’ Christopher Columbus: The Discovery) and met with a less than rapturous response from critics. Such shunning is undeserved, as 1492: Conquest of Paradise is a richer and more thought-provoking experience than both the avowedly lowbrow Gladiator and the re-evaluated-but-still-so-so director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven. It may stand guilty of presenting an overly sympathetic portrait of Columbus, but it isn’t shy about pressing a critical stance on his legacy.

Sanchez: The truth is, that he now presides over a state of chaos, of degradation, and of madness. From the beginning, Columbus proved himself completely incapable of ruling these islands…

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