Robert De Niro is a prole officer living his life completely by wrote, afraid of his internal violence. (We kind of see this in an opening scene with younger stand-ins for De Niro and his wife Frances Conroy). He goes to church regularly and does Bible studies with Conroy, and the two quietly drink themselves into a stupor every evening.
De Niro is nearing retirement, but one of his last cases is Edward Norton, a convict serving a 10 year sentence for involvement in the murder of his own grandparents. Norton is more than a little slick and tries to play De Niro, but can't get through his "by the book" exterior. He sics his wife Milla Jovovich on him to attempt to seduce and compromise his integrity.
This is a frustrating film because it has something like the makings of a really good film, but it just fails to deliver on pretty much anything. It has SERIOUS THEMES. It has more SERIOUS THEMES than it knows what to do with. At the heart of the film is the suggestion that ... perhaps ... people with deep spiritual holes try to fill them with religion of some sort, but halfhearted religious observance does nothing for them. (Or it thinks that all religion is an attempt to fill spiritual holes ... hard to really say.) What the film really fails to do is anything beyond raising themes and then letting them just kind lie there flopping around.
It doesn't help that neither De Niro nor Norton are very good here. De Niro is walking through the motions of playing someone walking through the motions. Norton's performance feels like an imitation of a prisoner he met somewhere. I'm not certain if it's really their fault, since the movie really just gestures at the interiority of it's characters, so it's unclear if they really had anything to work with.
De Niro is nearing retirement, but one of his last cases is Edward Norton, a convict serving a 10 year sentence for involvement in the murder of his own grandparents. Norton is more than a little slick and tries to play De Niro, but can't get through his "by the book" exterior. He sics his wife Milla Jovovich on him to attempt to seduce and compromise his integrity.
This is a frustrating film because it has something like the makings of a really good film, but it just fails to deliver on pretty much anything. It has SERIOUS THEMES. It has more SERIOUS THEMES than it knows what to do with. At the heart of the film is the suggestion that ... perhaps ... people with deep spiritual holes try to fill them with religion of some sort, but halfhearted religious observance does nothing for them. (Or it thinks that all religion is an attempt to fill spiritual holes ... hard to really say.) What the film really fails to do is anything beyond raising themes and then letting them just kind lie there flopping around.
It doesn't help that neither De Niro nor Norton are very good here. De Niro is walking through the motions of playing someone walking through the motions. Norton's performance feels like an imitation of a prisoner he met somewhere. I'm not certain if it's really their fault, since the movie really just gestures at the interiority of it's characters, so it's unclear if they really had anything to work with.