First Down

So now we come to the movie I thought I was seeing when Murder at 1600 mistakenly arrived in my mailbox. A few weeks later, I received what I'd actually intended, Murder in the First. I didn't know much about the movie, other than that it was supposed to feature one of Kevin Bacon's better performances. And the fantastic Gary Oldman was in it too. The credits rolled... oh, William H. Macy and Brad Dourif too! This was going to be pretty good, right?

Not so much.

So what this movie really is is a "based on true events" story of a small time criminal (Kevin Bacon) who winds up in Alcatraz prison in the late 30s. After failing in an escape attempt, the warden (Gary Oldman) punishes him with a variety of tortures including three years in solitary confinement in brutally dungeon-like conditions. When finally released, the convict has transformed into a neal-feral animal, and soon kills another inmate. His young, upstart defense attorney (Christian Slater) decides to put the prison on trial, blaming the torture and not the man himself.

I can say this: as advertised, Kevin Bacon throws his all into this part. I've quite honestly been more impressed with him in other movies, but this must surely have been the most demanding performance of his career. He goes through hell in this movie.

Which is one of its earliest flaws. The first half hour of the movie is a borderline snuff film where we see his character abused in a variety of horrifying ways. Yes, it's meant to set us up to appreciate just how bad the conditions of Alcatraz's "dungeons" were, but it goes on far longer than is really necessary to convey the point.

...Particularly when it turns out the movie isn't even really about him. The writer had an interesting subject, but he chose to package it as a too-typical legal drama about a brash young attorney trying to make a name for himself by taking on the system. Christian Slater's character is definitely the protagonist once things finally start rolling, but he doesn't even appear on screen until the lengthy "torture prologue" is done with. The writer seems to recognize the inherent problem in keeping the protagonist off screen for the first quarter of the movie, but doesn't solve it well -- he instead writes a series of awkward narrations, of the not-yet-introduced lawyer talking about what he's doing over the years we're watching the convict suffer. As if it matters.

Stranger still, once lawyer and convict unite and the real plot (as this movie sees it) begins, we still are occasionally shown flashbacks to the torture in the prison. Now here, my complaint is not that the movie continues to dwell on the subject even after serving us half an hour of it. Rather, my complaint is that the solution to the entire mess is right there if only the writer, director, someone had seen clearly enough to realize it.

The entire movie should have been built in this flashback structure. It should have started with Bacon's character stabbing the inmate, and immediate;y introduced Slater's lawyer character. Both he and us, the audience, would begin wondering what had driven a man to this state. And then, as the two slowly built a relationship, and testimony came out in court, we could see new pieces of torture in the prison. It would have made things more narratively interesting, and it would have broken up the off-putting opening act. With, say, five or six flashbacks, the movie could have played much better. Instead, we get two -- strange scenes left orphaned in the middle of the piece.

Yes, a lot of the acting is good. (Not so much Christian Slater, who may not be capable of playing more than one person. As the recently canceled TV series "My Own Worst Enemy" proved.) But all that merely salvages a little something from an absolute mess. It hardly makes the movie worth seeing. I rate it a C+. It may indeed be one of Kevin Bacon's performances, but the man has a substantial filmography. (He has a game, for crying out loud.) Your time would be better spent elsewhere in it.