Innocent

Bill Pullman is Judge Sabich. he has a past, and when one of his own law clerks takes another job, things get complicated. they think they got away with it, but there were witnesses.... lots of them. and lots of people lying to other people. trials. some cheesy acting as the prosecutor's team tries to prove that the judge knocked off the wife. these are all bad people. It's pretty good, for what it is, apparently a TV movie. Written and directed by Mike Robe. not a lot about him out there. this shows on the Epix channel. not a lot of votes or reviews for this one on imdb.

Judging by its all-star cast, this movie should be enough to be put on the pedestal. Yet, its quality more liked those on Lifetime channel. From the beginning, it did not have such suspensions like Hitchcock's movies. Although the plots were complicated, they did not resonate with audiences. The intensity of dark dramas also did not have enough momentum to carry through the whole movie. Its surroundings and paces were also lack of plausibility among other things.

It probably should be remade by different directors. I was not thrilled by those presumptuous plots which the writer tried to reinvent. In my opinion, it should have revealed the wife's mental illness from the beginning. The disclosure in the end was not enough. The wife's struggling needed to be drawn to connect the whole storyline. This missing part is crucial to the whole movie. It indeed required better cinematographers, too. I hope to see a different version of it in the future.

A glaring omission that should have been present in all movies involving Barbara is the fact that Barbara is a few fries short of a Happy Meal. There's no research showing mentally ill people who can act normal for years and work as a teacher without doing something to attract attention if not legal problems.

This is an efficient movie with some neat twists and turns in the solving of a crime. It is largely inoffensive because it is constructed to the well worn formula of finger pointing to a murderer and then seeing just how many things can change your mind before the credits roll.

The acting is reasonable but not sensational with the victim, Barbara (Marcia Gay Harden), being the best at everything in the back story played out throughout the film. Nothing sticks out as faulty, but it is not especially memorable either.

If you like courtrooms and enjoy trying to work crimes out then it is worth a rental.

This made-for-TV version of the Scott Turow novel is a competently made but not particularly inspiring translation to the small screen. With Bill Pullman and Alfred Molina in two of the leading roles, the acting is fine, but for some reason there seem to be a lot of English-as-a-second-language characters. Molina and the woman who portrays the judge play them with accents.

One of the issues of courtroom dramas on screen is that they take place in a small space and there isn't much real movement going on. Typically, this is covered by an active camera, and that happens here, with short editing cuts and a camera that moves. Injudiciously applied, it becomes frantic, even hysterical, and that happens occasionally here.

Even so, the central story is a solid one. If you have any taste for this genre, it's a couple of hours well spent.