By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 2.5 cats
Director: David Dobkin
Starring: Billy Bob Thornton | Dax Shepard | Grace Zabriskie | Jeremy Strong | Robert Downey Jr | Robert Duvall | Vera Farmiga | Vincent D'Onofrio
Country: united_states
Year: 2014
Running time: 141
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1872194
Thom says: “This is a bulging, pompous, treacly mess of a film that has big bucks written all over it. Here Downey Jr. (he takes his A-List status very seriously these days) plays a Chicago defense lawyer of dubious moral sense, Hank Palmer, who returns home after an absence of many years after learning that his mother has passed. He absolutely loathes his father, a county judge of some acclaim because of the cruelty that he showed him when he was growing up, and blaming him for the accident that left his older brother mentally incompetent. He also has anger issues and has no respect for other people, we see this early on when he pisses on an opposing attorney.
“Hank intends to high-tail it back to Chicago at the earliest opportunity but before he leaves his father is arrested for murder and because of the incompetence of his public defense attorney he decides to represent him at the murder trial. Nice & simple right? Wrong, with Hank’s messy divorce, a wiser-than-her-age little daughter, the girl friend from his school days who’s still lovely and sexy, her slutty but smart illegitimate daughter (who might be Hank’s), an Alzheimer fright for a stage-4 cancer patient, the righteous rage of the younger brother now gone to seed, the redneck psychosis of a local family (another great performance from the hopelessly underrated Grace Zabriskie), and much more that I won’t go on with. It gets tiresome, there is no suspense, and worst of all the film is easily 30 minutes too long and has one false ending after another. It can be entertaining
to see so many class actors try their best to make credible characters, but they are going to need a better, more economical script if they want to pull it off. 2.5 cats”