TRUE BELIEVER
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1989 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: James Woods is great at playing characters who are just a little slimy and self-serving. As a not-very-choosy civil liberties lawyer he finds for once he wants to believe his client is innocent. James Woods' usual realistic performance matched with a plot as complex as an Agatha Christie make TRUE BELIEVER one of Woods' better films. Rating: low +2.
James Woods is one of those actors like Harry Dean Stanton and Richard Farnsworth who have been around for a long time as character actors and who have built up a small following. He will probably never see his name in big letters over Times Square, but when he shows up in a coming attraction, a lot of people, myself included, make a careful mental note of the film's title. Woods, with a pock-marked face and a voice that is just this side of being actually gravelly, generally plays slimeballs very effectively. For me the films that come to mind when I think of Woods are VIDEODROME, SALVADORE, and ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. It is not that he is in such good films: TRUE BELIEVER is in third crime film in a row, the other being BEST SELLER and COP, neither bad but neither very good either. By a wide margin TRUE BELIEVER is the best of the three and may well have the best script of any of his films.
Eddie Dodd (played by Woods with a ponytail) made a reputation for himself in the 1960s as a great civil liberties lawyer. He tells himself he is in the same civil liberties fight today, but his clients are almost exclusively drug dealers entrapped by the police and deep down it bothers him that while fighting for a constitutional principle he is also freeing a lot of guilty clients. Then he is shaken from this routine by a new assistant (played by Robert Downey, Jr.) and a case defending a Korean who was convicted eight years earlier of a Chinatown gang killing and is now accused of a second killing in prison. Dodd decides to see if he can overturn the original conviction. In spite of Shu Kai Kim's lack of cooperation, Woods wants desperately to believe Kim was innocent of the original killing. So begins a complicated investigation involving neo- Nazis, drug dealers, and possible police corruption.
TRUE BELIEVER has a puzzle of a plot with clues slipped to the viewer at unexpected moments. But like an Agatha Christie, everything makes sense by the end of the film. The byplay between Dodd and his new assistant is often witty and often angry, but unlike so many other crime films, it never seems artificial or set up. Director Joseph Ruben, who previously directed DREAMSCAPE and THE STEPFATHER, needs good actors and a good script. Woods is a good actor but he also needs a good script. Wesley Strick gave them a good script and they made a good, solid crime mystery. I rate it a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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