La loi criminelle

Criminal Law is directed by Martin Campbell and written by Mark Kasdan. It stars Gary Oldman, Kevin Bacon, Tess Harper, Karen Young and Joe Don Baker. Music is by Jerry Goldsmith and cinematography by Philip Meheux.

Boston attorney Ben Chase (Oldman) successfully defends Martin Thiel (Bacon) who is on trial for a sexually aggravated murder. But not long after Chase comes to realise Thiel's guilt and sets about correcting the wrong he helped orchestrate.

If you have never seen a legal thriller before, or a serial killer based neo-noir for that matter, then Criminal Law might just poke its head above average waters. Unfortunately the well is quite full of such filmic exercises, and much better they are too!

It's all so formulaic, where the potent promise of character disintegration into a hellish noir infused world is never fully realised. Instead we get characters whose actions are at times baffling, others who are under used or pointless scene fillers, and a screenplay cracking under the strain of a near two hour run time. Add in some poor accents for the setting, one of Goldsmith's worst scores and a damp squib finale, well you are struggling continually to get on board with it all. There's a high energy sex scene where the makers are clearly showing what their intentions were, in how stuck in a web of turmoil Chase is, but it just proves how muddled and rickety the narrative is.

Positives come in the form of the visual look of the piece, Meheux (GoldenEye/Casino Royale) showing some nice stylish touches, most notably a dark underground set of scenes where slatted shadows operate as the noir staple of a character psychologically imprisoned, but these moments are fleeting and the story begs for more. Elsewhere, the killer's motives are at least interesting, adding in a controversial moral poser, and Elizabeth Shepherd as Thiel's mother is superbly cold and detached (pic needed more of her). But ultimately it's a disappointing film and not recommended as a must see. 5/10

(taaa-daaa)....what the hell is a Mystfest anyway? "Criminal Law", an aging thriller/suspense flick, features a supercharged Oldman plays a hotshot attorney who gets involved with a client who....aw, never mind. This film is so convoluted I felt like I should be taking notes. The problem is, I was too busy yawning. Engaging at first, "CL" wears itself out early on as Campbell steers his crew through a rote production, apparently obsessed propagating his notion of good film to the exclusion of the audience's. A dreary Canadian shoot with a made-for-tv feel, "CL" gives us little with which to empathize and so we quickly disengage and let the movie run wearing itself out to the drooping of audience eye lids.

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

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.

Criminal Law is a thriller of the first order.

Performances were outstanding by all. The Martin Thiel character, played to dizzy, frightening reality by Bacon, is chilling, to say the least.

The courtroom scenes were excellently written and performed. Oldman, as Ben Chase, acts at a high level as he brings his character through the torturous conflict between his professional ethics and his own humanity. Without, I might add, any British accent showing through, but with a clearly intentional Irish brogue when his blood is up. Nice work, that.

Mark Kasdan--author of Silverado and brother of writer/director/producer Lawrence Kasdan--writes a spare story with immediate suspense. He neatly puts attorney and client in a cat-and-mouse game, where Chase's silence, or betrayal, are equally dangerous for him, and for his love interest, Ellen, played well by Karen Young (Heat, 9-1/2 Weeks).

Elizabeth Shepherd plays the icy mother to perfection. Her blind devotion to her son, along with the absence of any physical display of emotion, are together at the root of the Thiel family dysfunction. This interpersonal rift makes the Martin Thiel character appear stiff and creepy and adds to the confusion and suspense of his innocence or guilt in the string of grisly sex murders that pepper this film.

The use of fire and rain throughout also enrages the imagination and adds clearly to the loathing an animal fear in Criminal Law. It is easy for the viewer to feel stalked or hunted in these parts of the movie--deliciously!

Tess Harper and Joe Don Baker have critical but minor roles, and do nothing to spoil the suspense of it. Both get well into their characters, though, somehow, Harper's Det. Stillwell and Shepherd's Dr. Thiel persona seem too similar...a minor overall script chemistry complaint, at that.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable movie, much better than most we see today almost 20 years hence. Yes, there are minor scripting flaws that I think the true movie-lover will forgive. Any fan of Kevin Bacon and/or Gary Oldman who hasn't seen this film is missing something terrific.