<b>OUT OF ORDER:</b> The Judge stars Robert Downey Jr. as a big-city lawyer who returns to his hometown when his father comes under suspicion of murder.

Courtroom dramas ought to be smart. When you think about mind-candy films like Witness for the Prosecution, 12 Angry Men, or even The Lincoln Lawyer, it’s the histrionics of attorneys, juries, and order-in-the-court gavels, but the entertainment is built over a foundation, a clever kin to the whodunit: reversals played out in the ultra-formal setting of The Palace of Law.

This movie is dumb. Which is surprising since the leading men are all so A-List. The esteemed Robert Duvall is a stern patriarch and title character, and the always-watchable Robert Downey Jr., whose entire shtick is the savvy wisecrack, plays the bratty son as a morality-free attorney. (Around here, we just call that “a lawyer.”) Papa gets in trouble, and his estranged son must come to the rescue. Of course, every fatuous family-is-everything device is employed, mortality is invoked, and a wide-eyed prodigy daughter fills in the schmaltzy gaps.

What we keep waiting for is some sort of ingenious surprise or some golden revelation. (There’s even a bizarre flirtation with incest that gets promptly dropped by the inexpert script.) Instead we get a plot that seems like it’s managed by a bad sitcom team who knows how to score heart tugs every 10 minutes but can’t even keep the characters fixed. One moment, Duvall’s character is a thundering hypocrite; three minutes later, he’s a kitty cat. What this movie needs is some literary equivalent of the rule of law; what we get is emotional gunk worthy only of unequivocal objections

Login

Please note this login is to submit events or press releases. Use this page here to login for your Independent subscription

Not a member? Sign up here.