Good director, bad script

>> High Crimes craps out in high style

by MARK SLUTSKY

Watching High Crimes, a new thriller from director Carl Franklin (One False Move, Devil in a Blue Dress), is a painful experience—and it’s not because the movie is totally worthless. No, High Crimes is for the most part pretty good, but it crashes and burns so catastrophically towards its end that you feel almost sorry for it.
A real shame, because for a while there the movie actually succeeds as an exciting little suspenser. Ashley Judd plays a high-profile defence lawyer married to Jim Caviezel, who seems nice enough (if a bit of a blank slate). He’s got a weird, spaced-out thing going on, but it makes sense when all of a sudden he’s arrested by FBI agents and hauled in front of a military tribunal to stand trial for a civilian massacre he allegedly committed as a special ops agent in El Salvador years before. Outraged, Judd steps in to defend him and expose a big military cover-up, with a little help from Morgan Freeman, who plays a grizzled, ex-alcoholic, ex-Marine lawyer.

Okay, it doesn’t sound great. And really, the story’s not that hot. But Franklin’s great at the suspense stuff, and he manages to make the mediocre script into a pretty thrilling drama. For a while, at least. You’re always aware that it’s trash, but it seems like maybe it’s that rarity these days, that tantalizing brand of A-list trash. It’s easy, with Franklin’s classy directing style, to forget the crappy script for a while. Then, when you’re hoping they’ll find a nice solution to the big conspiracy, a whole bunch of really stupid things happen and the movie ends about five seconds later.

What moments before had seemed like a solid thriller suddenly turns into one of those movies that ends with someone finding crucial information on a computer just in the nick of time. Then there’s a fight scene, a gunshot, an epilogue, and the end credits. And nothing’s explained at all. In fact, the senseless ending makes the entire movie pretty much meaningless, and the experience of watching it simply aggravating. :

High Crimes opens Friday, April 5