Susan Granger’s review of “HIGH CRIMES” (20th Century-Fox)
This courtroom drama/thriller clicks along at such a clever pace that – until it’s over – you may not realize how implausible it really is. Ashley Judd plays a cocky, aggressive San Francisco criminal attorney whose confidence is shaken when her adored husband – that’s Jim Caviezel – is arrested by a SWAT team, incarcerated at a military base and accused of killing innocent peasants in the Salvadoran village of Las Colinas in 1988 during his military career. Naturally, she’s suspicious because he never told her that he was a fugitive who’d changed his name. Plus, his defense is shaky: that he was framed by superior officers. Nevertheless, she believes him and takes on his case, working with his novice military lawyer (Adam Scott). Quickly realizing she needs expert advice, she recruits Morgan Freeman, a disgraced military lawyer now coping with alcoholism. “Military justice is to justice what military music is to music,” he warns her. Thrown in for diversion are stereotypes like Judd’s ditsy sister (Amanda Peet), a stony-faced prosecutor (Michael Gaston), a menacing Marine (Juan Carlos Hernandez), an implacable judge (Jude Ciccolella) and an arrogant General (Bruce Davison). Ashley Judd seems to specialize in playing humorless professionals-in-peril; she teamed with Freeman in “Kiss the Girls.” Now Morgan Freeman is such a consummate actor that he can convince you of anything – but the twisting plotline veers out-of-control when director Carl Franklin and writers Yuri Zeltser & Cary Bickley, working from Joseph Finder’s novel, delve into the moral ambiguity of U.S. foreign policy. The complex, cliché-filled cover-up is too conveniently contrived. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “High Crimes” is a suspenseful 6 – until you discover it just doesn’t make much sense.
