A vastly comprehensive staging of a real-life case that begins with a brilliant opening title tracking shot, this non-fiction novel of a film fuels its two hours with mortality and guilt complexes, and the exploitation of the judicial system to spoil fair dealing. Set in 1963, this is a potent, disturbing story but it's also a messy one, colonized by peripheral figures and various plot strands. The criminals' back stories are every bit as drawn-out and fascinating as those of the policemen they kidnapped. Even the courtroom drama is uncommonly full of twists and turns, indeed introducing a new legal team with each new trial.
The film is by and large brisk and periodically thrilling, but it's also thick with incidents that are just hastily elucidated, sans the key storyline that might have offered a lucid point of view. Not even Savage surfaces as hub for our concern, though the film's structure seems to imply that he's intended to be. Regardless, John Savage's everyman LAPD plainclothesman is intensely, horrifically felt. His self-reproach about the incident brings about nightmares, impotence, sudden reduction in his body mass, shrinking by a full inch, kleptomania and a penchant toward suicide. When the film begins to speed headlong into its convoluted proceedings, the performances take on a strong naturalism that negates how things start out.
For the first 45 minutes, each actor seems somewhat creatively stifled. Despite the presence of a given performer, they all give deliveries that feel like the screws were tightened in the read-through stages. Surprisingly, Ted Danson, in his feature film debut, seems the most natural. Still, perhaps because the hues of lockstep theatricality by the cast during the exposition are so bright, I, knowing hardly anything about the plot coming in, could predict who would be murdered. Maybe that's not a flaw on the part of the film, but I'd like a film with a vision that allows me to be sure of where I stand in terms of what its story reveals.
Nevertheless, Seales and particularly James Woods, who is always interesting anyway, grow less overstated and more chillingly credible. Woods has some excellent exchanges with Ronny Cox, who gives another of his exceptional performances as the detective in command of interrogating the two. Woods as the sociopathic Powell, charismatic, controlling, and mainly the driver packing heat, creates a flakiness in the character that gives off the threat of a bright spark near a swimming pool.
The film is by and large brisk and periodically thrilling, but it's also thick with incidents that are just hastily elucidated, sans the key storyline that might have offered a lucid point of view. Not even Savage surfaces as hub for our concern, though the film's structure seems to imply that he's intended to be. Regardless, John Savage's everyman LAPD plainclothesman is intensely, horrifically felt. His self-reproach about the incident brings about nightmares, impotence, sudden reduction in his body mass, shrinking by a full inch, kleptomania and a penchant toward suicide. When the film begins to speed headlong into its convoluted proceedings, the performances take on a strong naturalism that negates how things start out.
For the first 45 minutes, each actor seems somewhat creatively stifled. Despite the presence of a given performer, they all give deliveries that feel like the screws were tightened in the read-through stages. Surprisingly, Ted Danson, in his feature film debut, seems the most natural. Still, perhaps because the hues of lockstep theatricality by the cast during the exposition are so bright, I, knowing hardly anything about the plot coming in, could predict who would be murdered. Maybe that's not a flaw on the part of the film, but I'd like a film with a vision that allows me to be sure of where I stand in terms of what its story reveals.
Nevertheless, Seales and particularly James Woods, who is always interesting anyway, grow less overstated and more chillingly credible. Woods has some excellent exchanges with Ronny Cox, who gives another of his exceptional performances as the detective in command of interrogating the two. Woods as the sociopathic Powell, charismatic, controlling, and mainly the driver packing heat, creates a flakiness in the character that gives off the threat of a bright spark near a swimming pool.