It's been awhile since Matthew McConaughey really seemed keen on being an actor in preference to a beefy shirtless smile for producers to drape a blonde actress on. With this mechanical legal drama, he still doesn't substantiate much significant concern with dramatic recreation. A few cocky furrows of that rigid brow and some wily, bourbon-battered line deliveries obey the role, as is normal. Though luckily, some of the people sharing the screen with him give The Lincoln Lawyer some needed integrity. With William H. Macy, John Leguizamo, Marisa Tomei, Bryan Cranston and Michael Pena interjecting from the tangents, the film is intermittently freed from its forced manner by cream-of-the-crop players with a knack for natural, unaffected and all the more compelling delivery. These roles aren't exceptionally big or unpredictable, but they make it refreshingly idiosyncratic. Each of these supporting actors brings a less predictable fluency that establishes a past between themselves and McConaughey without lots of exposition, though the script is mainly interested in its mechanical use of Tomei as his prosecutor ex-wife, of course, and P.I. buddy Macy, able to roll with most any punch beneath unkempt shag-top.
McConaughey sports his routine self-assurance and charisma in a role that should fit him as well as the loud designer suits his unrealistic character fancies. Mick Haller is a social butterfly of a highly unlikely defense lawyer, flitting from one rendezvous to the next in his glossy, stylish eponymous town car out of which he operates, slipping people money with a smirk and having a cool black bodyguard while a comic book catalogue of offenders compete for his card like the ladies compete for McConaughey's number. He's that brashly calculating litigator who knows which hands to oil and how to neatly hemorrhage a client of money.
Mick isn't supposed to always be a likable guy, nor a bad one either, indeed a much humbled one, ideally, and that's part of what gives the movie its needed sharpness. Actually, we tend more to like near-McConaughey lookalike Josh Lucas, playing the inexperienced prosecutor going after Phillippe. The plot whirls Mick into a case that at first looks like a bonus but becomes a possibly career-ending devastation. After twisting his slyest sleight of hand, Haller is solicited to represent a particularly prestigious client in the guise of a young, well-to-do Ryan Phillippe, indicted for beating and raping a prostitute. Haller sees a superb take-home packet and maybe even that most infrequent of luxuries: a genuinely innocent defendant.
However, anyone paying attention will continuously look askance at the rich client, at the scene where Haller rides up on him while he's swatting golf balls on a course whose vast deluxe greens set alongside the azure Pacific might as well be a postcard reading "I'm rich and you're not." In a respectable twist, the crucial mystery of the plot is answered about midway through the movie and it then becomes about some witty legal manipulation by Mick. If you've seen Primal Fear and Jagged Edge, you understand the general effect of this route through the overcrowded but virtually surefire courtroom genre.
This is a film that intermittently comes within reach of the stark, wicked, and darkly shrewd legal thriller that it wants to be, but never quite knows how to stay there. But hey, the desaturated sheen of the film and fly-on-the-wall hand-held camera-work make the bilious innards of LA fittingly tense. All of this coagulates in an adequate manner. It's not inspired, it's a long way from perfect, and the second emergence of the biker gang officially meets the criteria, I think, of a phenomenon. The formula of ostensibly superfluous and ancillary characters comes satisfactorily into play as proceedings from the present are discovered to be linked to the past. I did feel destabilized by the movie's ultimate surprise, which is totally capricious and uninformed. The intrigues seem like half-baked shots in several directions made household by other crime pictures. But for what it is, this certainly tense spellbinder is workmanlike, likeably acted and engaging.
McConaughey sports his routine self-assurance and charisma in a role that should fit him as well as the loud designer suits his unrealistic character fancies. Mick Haller is a social butterfly of a highly unlikely defense lawyer, flitting from one rendezvous to the next in his glossy, stylish eponymous town car out of which he operates, slipping people money with a smirk and having a cool black bodyguard while a comic book catalogue of offenders compete for his card like the ladies compete for McConaughey's number. He's that brashly calculating litigator who knows which hands to oil and how to neatly hemorrhage a client of money.
Mick isn't supposed to always be a likable guy, nor a bad one either, indeed a much humbled one, ideally, and that's part of what gives the movie its needed sharpness. Actually, we tend more to like near-McConaughey lookalike Josh Lucas, playing the inexperienced prosecutor going after Phillippe. The plot whirls Mick into a case that at first looks like a bonus but becomes a possibly career-ending devastation. After twisting his slyest sleight of hand, Haller is solicited to represent a particularly prestigious client in the guise of a young, well-to-do Ryan Phillippe, indicted for beating and raping a prostitute. Haller sees a superb take-home packet and maybe even that most infrequent of luxuries: a genuinely innocent defendant.
However, anyone paying attention will continuously look askance at the rich client, at the scene where Haller rides up on him while he's swatting golf balls on a course whose vast deluxe greens set alongside the azure Pacific might as well be a postcard reading "I'm rich and you're not." In a respectable twist, the crucial mystery of the plot is answered about midway through the movie and it then becomes about some witty legal manipulation by Mick. If you've seen Primal Fear and Jagged Edge, you understand the general effect of this route through the overcrowded but virtually surefire courtroom genre.
This is a film that intermittently comes within reach of the stark, wicked, and darkly shrewd legal thriller that it wants to be, but never quite knows how to stay there. But hey, the desaturated sheen of the film and fly-on-the-wall hand-held camera-work make the bilious innards of LA fittingly tense. All of this coagulates in an adequate manner. It's not inspired, it's a long way from perfect, and the second emergence of the biker gang officially meets the criteria, I think, of a phenomenon. The formula of ostensibly superfluous and ancillary characters comes satisfactorily into play as proceedings from the present are discovered to be linked to the past. I did feel destabilized by the movie's ultimate surprise, which is totally capricious and uninformed. The intrigues seem like half-baked shots in several directions made household by other crime pictures. But for what it is, this certainly tense spellbinder is workmanlike, likeably acted and engaging.