The first time I saw an anything about The Lincoln Lawyer – be it a pap shot of star Matthew McConaughey on set or the tease for the trailer on Yahoo! Movies – I thought to myself, Oh there goes the Shirtless Wonder...doing another rom-com....
He just looked sooo shiny. I figured he probably would be playing another shtick-y charmer. That’s how little I’ve come to expect from the guy, you know...how unsurprised I anticipate I’ll be the next time he takes to the silver screen.
Boy, was I wrong.
The Lincoln Lawyer is not more of the same ol’, same ol’ for McConaughey. It’s a bit of a return to form for the actor who first made a splash onto the Hollywood scene with a star-making turn as a lawyer in A Time to Kill back in the mid-’90s. He’s stretching his acting muscle once again, not just his biceps, for he is playing, yeah, a bit of a shyster, but a bright one at that, as well as a family man who grows a conscience when he takes on a case that confronts everything he’s about, in and out of the courtroom.
McConaughey plays Mick Haller in this adaptation of Michael Connelly’s best-selling thriller. Mick, a divorced dad, is a slick lawyer whom I recently heard the McC describe on the radio as the kind of guy who would’ve thrived as a top-dollar Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer had he been equipped for that kinda job and life (check out why he was attracted to the part here). He wasn’t, though, and that is why he runs his business from the back of his Lincoln, defending lowlifes.
He figures it’s easier to defend people who are, by all intends and purposes, guilty, and he’s quite good at what he does because he knows how to work the system, you see, which obviously hasn’t really endeared him to be LAPD or the DA’s office (Marisa Tomei pops up as his friendly and smart and sexy ex, who, btw, is a prosecutor, to humanize Mick).
Everything begins to...change for Mick when he meets Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillippe), a good-looking, high-profile, moneyed playboy with a penchant for semantics who thinks he’s God’s gift.
Louis has specifically asked for Mick after being accused of assault and rape. The latter doesn’t really know why, but he takes the case, anyway, because he is curious and it seems straightforward enough and oh-so-profitable. This, it soon becomes evident, was too good to be true, and their privileged relationship soon develops into a deadly match between two masters of manipulation.
The Lincoln Lawyer works hard to entertain, to keep us plugged into its pretzel-like twists, and McConaughey is super-salty in it.
It’s got a strong supporting cast, like Phillippe (playing sleazy much too well for his sake) and Tomei and William H. Macy, who pops up as Mick’s investigator BFF.
And although it definitely has a few blind spots – what, exactly, was the point of Tomei, other than to provide strength to an otherwise thankless role...and could Mick really have had such an easy time coming out of the high-stakes tight corner against which he found himself in the second half of the movie? – it is well worth a ride-along.
My Rating ***
Photo: Lionsgate Films.
No comments:
Post a Comment