True Crime (1999)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Too much of everything

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

"True Crime" is an exciting film to watch...and I am glad I saw it. And, the film brings up some really important reasons why the death penalty, at least in some cases, is a crazy punishment because you cannot undo it once it's done.Clint Eastwood (who is actually too old for this role) plays Steve, a reporter for an Oakland newspaper. He's a mess...a womanizer, a drunk and a jerk. But when he's given a last moment assignment to interview a man about to be executed, something odd happens to Steve...he begins to give a darn about something. And, the more he digs the more the case looks shaky...built upon only eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence.This is an uneven film. The portions with Eastwood were okay but not much more. Where the movie really, really shined was in portraying the man on death row and his family...that was marvelously made and Eastwood, in this case, was a better director than actor and got some marvelous performances out of everyone. Worth seeing but uneven and, when you think about it, hard to believe. Plus, that homeless guy...why was he in the film and who thought having him sexually harass ladies was funny or worth including in the story?!

Clint Eastwood has always been great at playing anti-Heroes, but this time, he went full out, playing a recovering alcoholic reporter who uses the case of a death row inmate to refurbish his career.You just don't like his character in this movie. He's a horrible husband, father and so on. He doesn't care about justice, he just cares about winning a Pulitzer. There's really nothing admirable about his character at all.Still, Clint does a good job here, and he has a great supporting cast, such as Isaiah Washington as the convict he is trying to save, or James Wood as his cynical editor. Also look for Lucy Liu as a store clerk before anyone knew who she was.I also kind of get the feeling that this role was written for a younger actor. One you could believe plausibly as the father of a six year old. The movie drags in places and is quite uncomfortable to watch in others. (Again, just about any scene with the aforementioned six year old in them.)

Directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, I didn't know anything about what this film would involve, and I will be honest in saying that it was purely because of the leading star, and his good supporting cast, that I decided to watch. Basically Steve Everett (Clint Eastwood) is an alcoholic and womanising reporter and journalist for the Oakland Tribune, and he is covering the story of Frank Louis Beechum (Romeo Must Die's Isaiah Washington) who faces execution for murder. The verdict of whether he killed a pregnant woman who owed him $96 was guilty, and he will be put to death at midnight in a few days, and Steve, who is also feeling grief after the death of his wife in a car accident, has to see if the sentence is fair. As Steve covers the story closer, he unearths undiscovered evidence from the night in question, that may prove that Beechum is in fact guilty, but his boss Bob Findley (Denis Leary) doesn't want to listen to him, since he is a disruption, and he slept with his wife. It comes to the point when Steve finds the substantial evidence that proves Beechum is indeed innocent, because of missed witnesses or something, and he races to stop the execution as it is about to happen, and in the end thankfully he stopped it just in time. Also starring Lisa Gay Hamilton as Bonnie Beechum, James Woods as Alan Mann, Bernard Hill as Warden Luther Plunkitt, Diane Venora as Barbara Everett, Michael McKean as Reverend Shillerman, Michael Jeter as Dale Porterhouse and K-PAX's Mary McCormack as Michelle Ziegler. Eastwood directs reasonably well, but his screen presence as the grizzled but determined investigator is a good performance, and the other good names in the cast get just about enough time to show their talent too, it is a simple of story of reporter trying to prove a man he is writing about innocent, but it is a near enough satisfactory crime thriller. Worth watching!

The unexpected catalyst, that eventually comes to propel the lead, through Clint Eastwood's 1999 detective thriller True Crime and into a realm of investigation; intuition and towards the truth arrives when a young female journalist on a very specific job is tragically killed in a road traffic accident. It is deemed, by most therein, that the woman was a great girl; a wonderful person and really good at her job – a woman who was "really on top of things" at the time of her death, and yet it appears was careless enough to be doing something around sixty, late at night and on a rain-sodden road having had the odd drink and on a stretch of track notorious for a certain deadly bend. Such stark differences between assumed sentiments and gruff realities having taken a good look at the situation are at the core of True Crime; a film driven by the force of Eastwood both on the screen and off it, in what is a film all about murky underestimations combating with hard-up truths. Fittingly, it is a film about a man placed into the same situation as the aforementioned deceased young journalist; a situation that has already run its course in terms of trials, allegations and musings although doesn't necessarily come out infallible to meaner, stone-wall truths which our lead eventually comes to suspect are omnipresent.Eastwood's character is Steve Everett, a California based journalist with years of experience but a debilitating marriage and a wavy track record of cracking open big stories though making bogus claims when all appeared right to him. The character is one of those old and wily, without necessarily being particularly nice, archetypes of movies of old whom just have that natural gift of being able to work their way through grisly problems and to both spot and comprehend things no one else seemingly can. He enjoys a drink and the company of a younger woman, whilst symptomatically struggles with his wife and infant daughter. His credentials are somewhat impressive, in that he managed to expose political sleaze, in spite of his own lifestyle, more broadly linked to that of the town's mayor, although the attempting to prove a rapist's innocence prior to their controversial confession was an instance in which his ability failed him.He works for that of a hotshot journalist chief named Alan Mann, played in that spitfire fashion by James Woods; a character of whom we are introduced to by way of a long tracking shot down and through the corridors of his building, as he spouts everything he needs to say - the scene concluding in his office which is rife with qualifications and journal covers of past newsworthy events. The case Everett ends up inheriting is that of the reporting on the execution of an African American individual who was given the death penalty for a store robbery and murder. He is Frank Beechum; a man, like Everett, with a wife and infant daughter and is played with effective understated regret by Isaiah Washington. Beechum is due to be killed via lethal injection in a few hours time, immediately rendering what eventually formulates as the crux of the film as a dramatic race against time – the manner in which he will be killed is somewhat agonisingly outlined to us with a measured precision by the warden and his staff, in that we are granted access to the chamber; steal a glance at all the switches and buttons and realise the magnitude of the situation. Additionally, the sheer chasm between the staff there and the likes of Everett, in regards to law enforcers or those of whom merely seek justice, is made prominent when one staff members shrugs upon being asked for an opinion and allows Beechum's court verdict to stand for his stance.The core of the film is Everett's attempt at uncovering something a little more concrete on why it is one would suspect Beechum of innocence; Eastwood doing really well to keep the film moving along, even if we don't necessarily buy into him as the sort of character Everett is - a younger, more aggressive presence in the mould of what Woods pulls off perhaps required. The film carries somewhat of a Bad Lieutenant vibe to it, as this tale of a man with some considerable power and questionable priorities charges through a world attempting to get to the bottom of proceedings plays out. Despite this, the film arrives with much more of a grounded; more accessible procession to it, and veers away from a more hardened edge of anti-heroism and such to the point that it perhaps required to be more dramatic and more biting.The film's element of its lead and his race against the clock is clumsily surmised every so often with inert insertions into proceedings of compositions of clocks or clock faces in some form; a persistent reminder that time is indeed running out, and an element overall which, try as it might, does not necessarily feel as prominent as it might have. In spite of what's at stake, there appears very little on the urgency scale and it lacks a wounding, cut-and-thrust dynamic which may have worked really well. Principally, Everett fights for a truth which will allow a victimised man to return to his wife and young daughter, as he himself disparagingly neglects that of what he has in that exact form. Running on this theme of redemption or righting wrongs, it is an opportunity for him to correct what happened in regards to that case of the misjudged rapist from years gone by; the film functional without necessarily being overly involved, a film which isn't necessarily dull but is safe, uninspiring fare which happens to conclude with the sort of sequence Robert Altman was actually sending up mere years previously in his Hollywood satire The Player. Whoops.