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FIND ME GUILTY A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2006 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): * 1/2
In FIND ME GUILTY, you'll get to witness a crime being committed right in front of your eyes. Although the movie takes great pains to tell you and to remind you that it is "based on a true story," the crime isn't the story in the movie but the movie itself. You will observe how once great director Sidney Lumet takes a famous trial and manages to suck all of the life out of it, leaving it as cold and dead as one of the many corpses produced by the defendants.
Much has been made of how Vin Diesel, as Mafioso Giacomo 'Fat Jack' DiNorscio, is breaking out with this role, thus proving that he possesses serious acting chops. Called Jackie Dee by his friends, Jackie is a crook who wants to be a lovable clown, so Diesel is really just doing another low grade comedy part. The difference is that this time Diesel isn't very funny, since the ponderous and pretentious script doesn't really know what it wants to accomplish.
The script, by the writing committee of Sidney Lumet, T.J. Mancini and Robert J. McCrea, concerns what is said to be the longest criminal trial in American history. The government takes almost two years in proving the seventy-six counts of criminal conspiracy against the twenty defendants, who are members of two large crime families. As witness after witness testifies to the crimes of these men, who sold drugs to our children and murdered people who got in their way, Jackie hams it up as his own defense attorney. And in a legal system much more worried about criminal rights than victim rights, you can probably guess where it is all heading.
The movie drags so much that you'll begin to swear that, like the television series "24," everything is happening in real time. Rarely have two hours felt so much like two years. The movie's only saving graces are a few fine but small performances by some of the supporting cast, most notably Ron Silver as the judge and Peter Dinklage as one of the many defense attorneys.
Trial dramas are one of my absolute favorite genres. It is hard for me to believe that FIND ME GUILTY is by the same director who gave us 1957's 12 ANGRY MEN, one of the best films ever made. I find Lumet guilty for not rewatching his classic to find out how to stage a film based on a trial and how to make a trial drama at least minimally compelling.
FIND ME GUILTY runs a very long 2:05. It is rated R for "strong language and some violence" and would be acceptable for teenagers.
The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday March 17, 2006. In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the AMC theaters.
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