Inocente ou Culpado?

I guess I'm not amongst the average viewers who found this a mediocre film. For sure it is slow-paced in places, but there are some fantastic scenes and great filmography. Oldman is the undoubted star and this is one of the few films in which I quite liked his character. He's a good actor. Bacon is mediocre in this, but the plot although nothing special does allow a great scene in which the baddie (Bacon) fights with Oldman's lastest flame and that is one very very good scene. She fights like a real woman would fight when cornered - feisty, no rules, all instinct, a real cornered rat. That is one cool scene! I reckoned the film was worth watching, just for that alone, but Oldman is good, very good. Questionable hair, but great acting.

As the last review (by a Mr. J. Sommersby) states, there are some dramatic flaws with Martin Campbell's direction of this film, and, hence, the story line. But if it's got ANYTHING, it's got the magnificence of an early Gary Oldman performance, which is worth just about anything to see. Gary Oldman may play a character who is not very well developed, but he plays him with his usual genius. No matter what movie Gary Oldman is in, he improves it completely.

I really wanted to like this film because it had two of my favourite actors in it- Gary Oldman and Kevin Bacon. Their performance is great, as with some of Martin Campbell's (Goldeneye) direction, but it is the story-line that ruins this film comprising of some decent scenes but overall the plot is unbelievable and ridiculous.

See this film if you're a huge fan of either Gary Oldman and Kevin Bacon! 'Criminal Law' has got some good moments but it equally has it's tedious ones due to a poor storyline and unbelievable plot! Visually, director Martin Campbell has a unique style and the performances from it's two leads are very good and intense in parts, but unfortunately doesn't save this film! 'Criminal Law' gets a **1/2 out of *****!

In 1988's Criminal Law, Gary Oldman plays Ben Chase, an attorney who defends a man, Martin Thiel (Kevin Bacon) accused of a particularly vicious murder. With clever lawyering, he gets Thiel off, only to realize shortly afterward that Thiel is guilty and out there killing again.

This time, though, Thiel is playing a mind game with Chase and wants to retain him when suspicion falls on him for a second murder that Ben knows he committed. Ben wants to right the wrong of the first "not guilty" plea so he agrees to work as Thiel's attorney, hoping for inside information that will convict the man.

This is very interesting premise, though the various themes get lost in an uneven script that tries to do too much. The focus actually becomes the performances of Oldman and Bacon - Oldman giving a very emotional performance and Bacon a very cold one.

Posts here have pronounced Oldman as hammy - hammy to me is when a performance is bigger than the emotions underneath so that the performance seems phony. Here, the character of Ben seemed to be truly overwrought, and the emotions came from a real place.

Oldman at any rate is an interesting actor, and this material in the hands of a lesser one would have made it dismissible. As it is, the film survives on the basis of the work of the two actors.

Honing in on one theme rather than several would have helped "Criminal Law." It tries to tackle psychosis, legal technicalities, the law versus justice, attorney-client privilege, mystery and romance in one script. When it comes out of the Mixmaster, it's all pretty vague.

Tangled in its superficiality, trying to be something more than just an ordinary thriller (and that's what this really is) about an psycho out of control "Criminal Law" wastes everything and everybody. Sadly, the movie couldn't warn us earlier, like 10 minutes from watching this and you would had the chance to know this might be an disaster and simply walk out of it. No, it goes quite well until the plot creates a mess bigger than the Everest and the K2 together (and director Martin Campbell, director of this, was in the latter in "Vertical Limit"), and worst, some of us want to climb it until the end but we can't. Why? Because we're not "trained" enough like the screenwriter from this flick. He and only he can decode this messy picture.

And to think of how good this could be! Gary Oldman plays an lawyer who just made his client Thiel (Kevin Bacon) free from jail, accused of rape and murder of a woman. Everybody's happy until a new wave of crimes similar to the one thrown on Thiel start off again. But this isn't like "Just Cause", the guy won't say he isn't guilty, rather than that he's gonna commit more and more murders AND will rub on his lawyer face (that lousy privilege between client and defendant) his next moves. It's up to this man to find a way to stop this criminal. Pretty exciting, isn't it?

"Criminal Law" becomes problematic when it decides to include random and uninteresting subplots about abortion, Thiel's family, and the lawyer's love interest and then it connects all of this parts together and mess it up real bad. It pretends to be real clever but it never succeeds. Take all that out and trade to saying something about ethics, difference between law and justice (they tried something about that but it wasn't enough), make a substantial dramatic film rather than 'to catch a serial killer' kind of thing and then we would have at least a decent movie, a relevant one.

By all means, this is a poorly executed film that only wasted good actors in giving them bad scenes to perform with. Being the script the worst thing of it, we must be ashamed to testify Kevin Bacon giving one of his worst performances of all, completely on the automatic pilot and ridiculous playing the villain; Oldman has good moments when he's not trying to sustain so many different accents into an American role. And why on Earth do the script have to include an strange sex scene with him awkwardly interspersed with him playing squash? Ridiculous!. Hope that the money received by them was worth it because they could've done better than this. If you enjoy both actors I'll highly recommend "JFK" and "Murder in the First" (coincidentally in all of three films their characters never get along). "Criminal Law" I can't and won't suggest.

A good idea and a wasted one. Big time! This is what happens when the hands get faster than the brain and the writer is not thinking of what's he doing. 5/10