No.203 : The Judge (2014)

The Judge at the IMDb

Alas this isn’t another film about Judge Dredd, but an overlong court room drama starting Robert Downey Jnr and Robert Duvall, who we recently saw in the more enjoyable The Outfit.

Downey plays Hank, a slick lawyer who will defend any client no matter how sleazy. He earns the big bucks and has a cute daughter, but his marriage has failed and he is estranged from his family. As a big case is about to close and just as Hank moves in for the kill, he gets a call to advise that his mother has died. The court adjourns and Hank heads back to his sleepy Indiana birthplace for the funeral.

He drives in a new truck, that looks for all the world as product placement, before meeting up with his two brothers, including a fat Vincent D’Onofrio, and his father Duvall, who was the town’s judge for 40 odd years. Hank has a drink and a squeeze with an attractive barmaid before meeting up with his old flame Vera Farmiga who you’ll know from ‘Up in the Air’. We learn that Hank went out to a concert one night and never came back, but fortunately Vera is most forgiving.

Hank gets a lift from Vera ,after falling off his bike, and he meets her daughter who just happens to be the barmaid he had kissyface with. She’s on break from law school and there is a brief suggestion that Hank may be her father.

Meanwhile damage is found to the front of Duvall’s car and he’s charged with killing a man by knocking him off his bike. It turns out the victim was a criminal whom Duvall had treated leniently but had gone onto kill a young girl. Duvall can’t remember the hit and run and is suffering from cancer and early onset dementia. Hank agrees to defend his Dad with the aid of Dax Shepard’s idiot lawyer, and they are soon up against Billy Bob Thornton, who has a score to settle against Hank.

Will the old man go down? Well what happens is…Objection! Watch it yourself or you can guess. You’ll probably get it right!

This was a decent effort but at 140 minutes it was too long. A lot of time was spend charting Duvall’s demise and to be honest I don’t need to see him shitting himself and getting showered down. It may have been a touching moment of weakness for a proud man, but I’d have been happy with a tell don’t show scenario here.

Hank’s journey was predictable as he started to see both sides of an argument to the extent that he was pondering taking over the judge’s chair at the end. The courtroom scenes were decent as the unbreakable case was slowly picked apart. There was too much of ’Objection your honour’ and too much latitude given when they started yelling out random stuff with the judge happy to see where it went.

The conclusion was balanced to some degree, with everyone winning but also losing, and with justice seeming to be served. Downey did his usual good show but if he donned the Iron Man armour half way though you wouldn’t be surprised. I could have done with more of Dax in his David Pleat suit, and it was a shame he didn’t get enough to do to earn ‘Employee of the Month’ this time around.
The will they won’t they love story didn’t go anywhere and the lovely Vera seemed a bit desperate.

There was some growth, some reconciliation and some redemption but alas too little editing. Trim an hour and you’d have a neat 90 minute drama rather than this meandering and bloated soap opera.

THE Tag Line : You are Judged to be Too Long!  67%

No.193 : The Outfit (1973)

The Outfit at the IMDb

No, it’s not a nice film about a pretty dress; ‘The Outfit’ is a pretty brutal gangster pic from 1973 that is seemingly a Tarantino favourite.

We open with a priest pulling something lethal from his pants. Don’t worry, it’s only a gun and I’m not sure he’s a priest. He and a cabbie gun down a man building a wall - must have disliked his pointing work. Meanwhile Robert Duvall is getting out of jail having done ‘two and a quarter’ for a firearms charge.

He’s picked up by Karen Black and learns that it was his brother who was killed in the first paragraph. Black goes to a motel with Duvall but he smells a rat and manages to avoid being whacked by ‘the outfit’ - basically the mob. Duvall and his brother had robbed a mafia bank a few years back and the deed is coming back to haunt them.

Not one to go on the defensive Duvall takes the mob on and demands $250k from them to back off. He hits a variety of card games and scams and eventually the mafia agree to pay him off. Of course the money drop is a trap but after escaping with his henchman, Joe Don Baker, Duvall decides to go up against the big boss, Robert Ryan.

Will he get the justice he doesn’t really deserve and who will get out alive?

I enjoyed this straightforward revenge picture that didn’t try to be overly complex, instead relying on some good planning and tense sequences. The near bald Duvall is great as Macklin although he is a bit of a low talker. 'Quiet menace' they’d no doubt call it, but speak up Bob! He was cunning and lethal in a fight, although I have to say ‘The Outfit’ weren’t really at the races; falling for every old disguise and misdirection trick in the book.

Black was OK as the moll, but she and all the female characters fared badly with ‘shut up’ the usual response they earned to every utterance. I liked one trouble making lady, who was a spit for Dee out of ‘Always Sunny’, who offered her charms to Baker and wasn’t impressed at his rejection. Another got a straight right to the chin and Black got a right good slapping for daring to touch Duvall’s pistol - and him just out of the joint too!

You could see this film as inspiration for a lot of features that followed, with Black running down two henchman going straight into ‘Breaking Bad’ and the showdown at the end  being seen many times since, in lesser productions.

The film zipped along with several robberies planned and executed in some detail. I thought the ending was a bit pat but at least it proved the old adage of always take a white coat with you on your murder sprees.

Duvall did well to bring some empathy to a scumbag character and you couldn't help but admire his quite determination to gain his flawed version of justice. I probably preferred ‘Charley Varrick’ which tread very similar ground, but there was plenty to like here and you can see why it is still well regarded in a crowded genre.

THE Tag Line : No Hair : Doesn’t Care    76%

No.150 : The Natural (1984)

The Natural at the IMDb

I always enjoy a good sports film but I’d never seen ‘The Natural’ before. Maybe the long run time of 137 minutes put me off or maybe the whole thing looked a bit too wholesome for my slightly seedier tastes. Well, now that I have seen it I can say it’s well worth a look and, although not the best baseball film I’ve seen (Major League 3 : Back to the Minors, seeing as you ask) it’s still pretty good.

We open with a young lad playing ball with his Dad - an idyllic scene right up to the point Pop has a heart attacked and snuffs it and then a tree gets hit by lightning for good measure. The lad is Roy Hobbs and when fate gives him an exploded tree he makes a baseball bat out of it. He calls the bat ‘Wonderboy’ just like Homer Simpson’s ‘Wonder bat’ - in fact most of the baseball Simpsons episode pays homage to this film, so that’s a blind spot in my education erased.

We jump forward a few years and the young lad has become Robert Redford. That’s one tough paper round he had! Redford was 38 when he made this, and there is no effort to explain why a 38 year old is playing a teenager. I thought I’d stick with it an all would be revealed - an old man’s fantasy maybe? No, they just didn’t have ‘The Irishman’ style de-ageing then, so just go with it.

Roy gets a call up to the Chicago Cubs and says goodbye to his equally middle-aged, but playing it  young, girlfriend Glenn Close. Roy gets on the train to Chicago and meets sports hack Robert Duvall and ‘The Whammer’ a Babe Ruth type baseball legend. The journalist sets up a bet that Roy can strike out The Whammer which he does, and in turn attracts the attentions of psycho groupie, Barbara Hershey. Barbara takes him back to hers but shoots him in the guts for his trouble. Not what he expected when she agreed to fire into him!

16 years pass and we meet the same Robert Redford whom everyone is now calling ‘Granddad’. He has been signed up by the New York Knights, the worst team in baseball. The manager doesn’t fancy Redford and keeps him on the bench, but a couple of strokes of luck, and a bad bay for Mr Blonde, see him in the team. Roy is a smash hit until he meets floozy Kim Basinger, the squeeze of the local bookie. Soon Roy is facing bribes and a slump in form. Will an old flame reignite the magic and will an old would prevent Roy from winning the pennant and saving the club?

You could probably delve into the subtext of this film and come up with an allegory for the corruption of the American Dream. I didn’t bother and enjoyed the tale of a man striving to win against the odds for what it was. There was a lot of nostalgia flying about with the games and crowds all wonderfully realised by director Barry Levinson.

The turning points of Roy’s life all involved the dames and I think the message is that you’d do better if you kept your pecker in your pocket. The villains such as the bookie and wannabe club owner, The Judge, were all a bit boo hiss and I wondered why they didn’t just bump Roy off rather than try to turn his head.

Some of Roy’s hits were great such as one where the ball is knocked out of it’s cover and others that destroyed clocks and stadium lights. It was well done and you’d be a cold individual not to get the chills when Roy faces the last pitch 2-0 down with two outs and two men on. To be honest I wasn’t sure he was going to win when a young version of himself was the new pitcher - would the story continue with the new ‘natural’? Nah, but it was a nice thought.

I was surprised that the film did as well as it did in awards season as I thought it was a bit slight, but like ‘Field of Dreams’ I think it would speak to Americans about better, more innocent times when you could meet women on trains and be shot by them!

Redford was good, but it was a mistake not to have any attempt at him looking any younger in his adolescent scenes - at one point I’m sure the conductor was going to give him senior citizen discount! The film more than makes up with that one conceit with an excellent cast and a finely realised world.

THE Tag Line :  Whammy!  79%