High Crimes

When indie directors dip into the mainstream, sooner or later they just go with the flow. Case in point: Carl Franklin, a fine craftsman who made his mark with One False Move, followed it up with the well reviewed Devil in a Blue Dress and the underrated weepie One True Thing. This is a blandly anonymous courtroom potboiler which attempts to squeeze an ounce of credibility from some vaguely liberal sentiments. Thus we have Judd as go-getting attorney Claire Kubik, who puts her career on hold to defend her husband (Caviezel) against trumped-up charges of orchestrating a civilian massacre while on covert operations in El Salvador in 1988. Together with washed-up army lawyer Charlie Grimes (Freeman), Claire sets out to prove her fella has been made the fall-guy for a political cover-up. There's not much here we haven't seen a hundred times before. It's quite watchable, utterly predictable. Weird, though, how the pert, capable but unprepossessing Judd has picked up Joan Crawford's mantle, playing endless variations on a gutsy, determined, resourceful woman with dubious taste in men.