Law Review

I missed The Lincoln Lawyer during its run in theaters earlier this year, but recently caught up with it on Netflix. I'd heard some decent reviews for it, and yet was still only expecting so much. It's sort of hard to expect too much from a legal movie, I think. Legal TV series can rely on established characters as the means to tell more unusual stories about unusual cases. Movies have only two hours to set up characters and tell their story, and that story has often been homogenized by the Hollywood studio system.

You might ask then, why bother at all? Well for one, there have been a few great legal films over the years. But in this case (pun not intended), there were some interesting actors in the mix too. I'm not talking about the lead, Matthew McConaughey, or even the major secondary characters played by Marisa Tomei and Ryan Phillippe -- though they all do a fine job. I was more interested in the veteran actors populating the fringes of the story, people like William H. Macy, John Leguizamo, Bob Gunton, Frances Fisher, and Bryan Cranston. Aside from Macy, none really has a significant role in the movie, but they certainly help build a credible and compelling world for this story to unfold in.

The case itself does manage to be interesting, though -- an oily, slick mess worthy of the oily, slick lawyer who is the film's protagonist. I think I'm not giving too much of the game away (though feel free to skip the rest of this paragraph) to say that the defendant in this story turns out to be a bad, bad man. Admittedly, a smarmy lawyer forced to find his own moral compass isn't an original story, but it's one told far less often than other Hollywood legal tropes.

The movie runs along well for a time, and the strength of the cast keeps it afloat even longer. But a less used cliché is still a cliché -- ultimately, you know exactly how this movie is going to end, and I found myself starting to lose interest before it got there. I grade it a B overall. It's good enough entertainment for a Netflix evening, and probably even as good as an average episode of whatever law TV show might be your drug of choice. Probably not as good as a good episode of said show.