The Lincoln Lawyer offers plenty of tasty legal jargon but ultimately delivers little. By scattering its supporting cast into the wind and leaving lead star Matthew McConaughey with nothing to do other than reprise his act from A Time to Kill, it remains a film where the ingredients are in place but the pressure cooker’s been turned off. In front of a cinematic jury, there simply isn’t enough hard evidence to warrant more than passing interest.
Taken from Michael Connelly’s novel, there are (inevitably) overtones of John Grisham’s entire back-catalogue plus superior courtroom thrillers like Jagged Edge. In fact, Jagged Edge appears to be the dominant influence in the early stages, particularly with regard to the ambiguity of the client charged with the horrendous crime. Said client is played by Ryan Phillipe, who is perfectly decent given the right material.
Here however, he’s less than interesting, given the nature of John Romano’s ho-hum screenplay. He plays spoilt rich kid Louis Roulet, charged with a dreadful assault and suffering under an overbearing mother (Frances Fisher). McConaughey plays slick lawyer Mick Haller signed on to defend him – but as is usual with these scenarios, it doesn’t take long for the case to take a sinister turn.
Strangely, bar a few introductory sequences, the film makes little use of the Lincoln town car in which Haller travels as a dramatic device. As with of the rest of the project, the surfaces look good but there’s no surprise lurking anywhere. And forget the crime that Phillipe is charged with: a much greater one is the neglect of sterling support like Marisa Tomei and William H. Macy (who clocks up a pathetic amount of screen time).
It’s a strangely underwhelming attempt, burdened by over-familiarity yet possessed of no real suspense or atmosphere. McConaughey meanwhile, in the latest of a long string of lawyer roles (chiefly A Time to Kill and Amistad) is simply going through the motions. For a movie supposedly attempting to grapple with the hypocrisy of the law, the real hypocrisy lies in its neglect of the savvy audience.
Rating 5/10
