BEFORE: Michael Douglas carries over, as does the theme of fighting crime inside and outside the system. Though I've watched a bunch of legal films, my main source of legal knowledge is still "Law & Order" - though less so since they cancelled 3 of the 4 shows in the franchise.
Thanks to that, and a few other cancellations ("Smallville", "Rescue Me"), I'm down to just 13 hours of network TV per week - that's what I save to VHS to watch later, since I'm 4 months behind. Part of my job is scanning through TV shows, but what I scan through is much greater than what I watch in real time. I vowed last season, and again this season, to not pick up any new shows until some more of my favorites finish their runs, or until I finish the movie project.
I'm down to: the 3 CSI's, Law & Order: SVU, The Amazing Race, the Fox Sunday animation line-up, the NBC Thursday comedy line-up, and Kitchen Nightmares. In the second tier is any competition show that involves cooking (Top Chef, Iron Chef, Hell's Kitchen, Chopped, Cupcake Wars), singing (American Idol, America's Got Talent, maybe X-Factor), or shooting (Top Shot). Then in the 3rd tier are shows like Dirty Jobs, Mythbusters, Shark Tank, Wipeout, Bizarre Foods, Man vs. Food, Restaurant: Impossible, and a few cartoons like Futurama and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
Yeah, it seems like a lot. It's hard to believe, but I have cut back.
This season's new shows look like another bunch of crap - I've got no interest in more procedurals like Unforgettable or Person of Interest, or the new "comedies" like Free Agents or Last Man Standing. And do we need TWO different shows, Grimm and Once Upon a Time, riffing off fairy tales? Surprisingly, I've also got no interest in the new show involving time travel (Terra Nova) or the one about stewardesses (Pan Am), or even the one about Playboy bunnies. Plus, the new Charlie's Angels doesn't even look that hot - it looks like they took all the sexy out of it, after Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu worked so hard putting it back in...
THE PLOT: Disgusted with criminals escaping the judicial system via technicalities, an idealistic young judge investigates an alternative method for punishing the guilty.
AFTER: Wow, you know the legal system is broken when even the judges don't think that justice is being served. What year was this made - 1983? Does that coincide with the start of the Libertarian Party, or something? Reagan was president back then - weren't we as a country getting tougher on crime?
Michael Douglas plays a judge (really?) who is forced by the letter of the law to dismiss some high-profile cases, which causes him to lose faith in the system. Funny, I thought that a judge could rule however he wanted - isn't that the point of a trial? But here he feels that if he were to continue the case, his decision would only get overturned on appeal, so what's the point of continuing?
Hell, by that reasoning, what's the point of doing anything? Why put criminals in jail? They're only going to learn better criminal techniques from the other convicts, and go right back to crime when they get out. Why arrest anyone, if their lawyers are going to plead their cases, and maybe get them off the hook.
My point is, some of the logic in the film seems a bit flawed. The gathering of judges who decide to review these old cases, where guilty people CLEARLY got away with murder, seeks to balance the scales - but perhaps they never heard that old saw about two wrongs not making a right. (But three rights make a left - think about it...)
The problem is, they only review the cold, hard facts of the case - and since they've got a hitman on retainer, they're maybe a little too eager to declare people guilty, and deserving of vigilante justice. Or they're just doing it to feel like they're making a difference - in which case action's going to feel better than inaction, and that's probably affecting their decisions as well.
Hey, remember that time we all got together and had that guy executed - but it turned out he didn't kill anyone, it was just a mistake? Hi-LAR-ious! Yeah, not so much.
Also starring Hal Holbrook (last seen in "Magnum Force"), Yaphet Kotto (last seen in "The Thomas Crown Affair"), Sharon Gless (last seen in "Airport 1975"), James Sikking (last seen in "The Electric Horseman"), Joe Regalbuto, with cameos from character actors Larry Hankin (last seen in "Armed and Dangerous"), Jack Kehoe, David Proval (later played Richie Aprile on "The Sopranos") and also Otis Day (from "Animal House").
RATING: 4 out of 10 class photos
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