True Crime Release date: May 7 1999 Clint Eastwood Isaiah Washington Denis Leary Director: Clint Eastwood Screen Writers: Larry Gross, Paul Brickman, Stephen Schiff Details: 127 mins Cert 15 USA
True Crime, Clint Eastwood's 41st starring role and 21st film as a director follows the done-to-death storyline of a prisoner on Death Row. Isaiah Washington is Frank Beechum, a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time who suddenly finds himself convicted, sentenced and forgotten for a convenience store robbery he never committed.
Six years later he is due a lethal injection at one minute past midnight. What he actually gets is a cliché. The cliché arrives in the form of Steve Everett (Clint) an ageing - and I do mean ageing - alcoholic and the kind of stereotypical movie journalists who wakes with a fag and a bottle of Jim Bean every morning in a cesspool apartment; the kind who can best be described as a hard-nosed, well lived-in maverick who makes up the rules as he goes along; the kind who could as easily be a long divorced, turned-to-the-bottle hard nosed maverick cop, or a downtrodden turned-to- the-bottle hard-nosed maverick private eye, or any number of other one dimensional hard-nosed maverick characters from a 70s thriller movie.
His boss at the Oakland Tribune is James Woods and here your heart begins to lift, you wonder if this might be the saviour of the movie. But no. Woods' character is such a cliché himself (cold-hearted, loud-mouthed, hard-nosed, seen-it-all editor-in-chief, with a real dislike for mavericks) you find yourself wondering if in making the film Eastwood and his team of writers didn't actually use the Reader's Digest Book of Failsafe Hollywood Formulas to contrive the whole deal. Indeed the film and its characters seem like a parody of themselves and James Woods' appalling overacting only contributes wholeheartedly to this impression. When Everitt becomes convinced of Beechum's innocence, Woods gives him one last chance - allowing him just 12 hours to come up with some hard evidence, save an innocent life and get the scoop, thus presumably saving himself from the next step in the evolutionary life of the alcoholic reporter/cop/private eye, that of unemployment and a chance to really hit the bottle with some vigour.
In all fairness you can't blame Clint for the dull plot. Andrew Klan, author of the original book must shoulder that particular responsibility. What you can blame Clint for, and blame I shall, is the evident gallon-load of Eastwood-ego he has poured shamelessly into the film. To be frank, Clint is passed it. He looks his age (69) and he certainly can't carry off the role he has awarded himself in True Crime, without looking decidedly out of place.
Think back to In the Line of Fire where he played an ageing bodyguard barely capable of keeping up alongside the President's car as it ambled along at a steady 2MPH, and you'll recall thinking you were watching Clint's last action role, his farewell to those glory-days of guns n' babes with an amusing send-up of his own debilitating OAP status. Unfortunately Clint seems far from ready to hand in his sex symbol status and bidding a sensible farewell to the glory days of guns n' babes is evidently the furthest thing from his mind.
Washington is the movie's only plus, carrying out his role as the sentenced convict with dignity and shrewd depth. You might suspect Denis Leary would add a credit or two to the film as well as some light relief, but sadly the strange bluntness of Leary's unsubtle humour and the serious racial undertones of the main plot mix as well as you'd expect. i.e. not atall.
So at the end of the decade we see another of life's unhappy events unfold - a man long past his sell-by-date refusing to go out gracefully. To my mind only Brando ever successfully accomplished such a feat and Eastwood is certainly a long way from entering that particular class of actor. Lets just hope, if he must return again with another film like this, its as director only. Like I always say, liver spots and action thrillers simply don't mix.
Wil Tirion (Saturn Popcorn) http://www.saturnuk.com/filmframes.htm writers@saturnuk.com
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