A legal drama that leaves too much unexplained. The principal motive behind the crime, for instance! Everything else about the movie is good, to be sure.
Criminal defense attorney, Mickey Haller (Matthew McConaughey) living around Los Angeles, who drives a Lincoln Town Car, with NTGUILTY on the number plate has mostly garden variety clients, off whom he makes his money, like most of the lawyers.
‘You are stalling his case until you see more green (money)?’…
He sets up a photographer to take pictures of himself and a VIP client’s family lawyer and then pays the photographer a Grand to hand him the tape. Minutes later, he stops by the photographer’s shop and collects back most of the money. He will of course, expense the Grand from the family!
He collects a lot of money from another client saying he must spend on aerial photographer, fly him from New York, put him up in a hotel. He is of course lying about all of it, for the photographer is local, from Hollywood.
‘The best camera experts in the world are right here in Hollywood…’
But those are the compulsions of his profession, minor crookery, beyond which, he is a scrupulous fellow who will not bear injustice done to a good man.
‘There is no client as scary as an innocent man. Because if you screw it up and he goes to prison, you're never going to be able to live with yourself’.
Which is when Louis (Ryan Phillippe) chooses Mickey to defend him, Mickey risks his own life and those of his family members to get Louis the death sentence!
Louis, a Beverley Hills playboy, son of real estate tycoon Mary Windsor, is accused of assaulting a prostitute and attempting to kill her, in her house. It appears at first glance that he has been falsely implicated by the girl and her male accomplices who tied him up and beat him.
But it turns out Louis had indeed tried to kill the girl with his knife. In fact, he had chosen Mickey because, in a previous case where Louis had succeeded in murdering a girl and implicated an innocent man who visited the girl after he had left, Mickey had represented that innocent man and not knowing the truth, persuaded him to plead guilty and receive life sentence instead of the death penalty.
Louis had chosen Mickey with the hope that this time too, Mickey would defend him and have someone else innocent punished for the crime.
This is a sick guy, who is not content with just stabbing random women with his knife and getting away with it scot-free, but he wants some innocent fellow to be implicated and sentenced for it!
Bound by attorney-client confidentiality, Mickey cannot denounce his client even after he has learnt the truth.
In fact, Louis has the impudence to admit to Mickey that he had indeed killed that woman, in a previous case and dares Mickey to prove it if he can.
Mickey grudges having to defend this guy, but very cleverly, he defends Louis in the present case while having him arrested for his involvement in the previous case, a matter that he brings to light through the calculated interrogation of a witness in the box, making it seem like ‘chance’ and not his ‘arrangement’.
Using Louis’s statement that he has a clean record and nothing else against him other than parking tickets, he has his aide investigate all of Louis’s parking tickets and finds one near the house of the girl he had murdered in the previous case.
He secures a release for the innocent man who was serving his life sentence and gets the District Attorney to seek death penalty against Louis.
Story ends.
All that is fine, but like I said, the motivation for the crime is not revealed at all.
Why did Louis do what he did? Was Louis’s mother in on the crime? Why did her son turn out a sick bastard?
No answers.
Marisa Tomei plays his ex-wife. But once in a way, they do sleep together. This is another thing that doesn’t make sense. Does it ever happen in reality? Isn’t intimacy the first thing that dies between couples when the marriage starts coming apart? I mean, even if there is an iota of attraction left between the two, that would be enough to keep them from wanting to part. Isn’t it?
Haha, this line was funny.
‘You got more balls than a Chinese ping pong tournament, I'll give you that’
#westerncinema
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