Criminal Law (1989)

best movie i've ever seen.

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Tangled in its superficiality, trying to be something more than just an ordinary thriller (and that's what this really is) about an psycho out of control "Criminal Law" wastes everything and everybody. Sadly, the movie couldn't warn us earlier, like 10 minutes from watching this and you would had the chance to know this might be an disaster and simply walk out of it. No, it goes quite well until the plot creates a mess bigger than the Everest and the K2 together (and director Martin Campbell, director of this, was in the latter in "Vertical Limit"), and worst, some of us want to climb it until the end but we can't. Why? Because we're not "trained" enough like the screenwriter from this flick. He and only he can decode this messy picture.And to think of how good this could be! Gary Oldman plays an lawyer who just made his client Thiel (Kevin Bacon) free from jail, accused of rape and murder of a woman. Everybody's happy until a new wave of crimes similar to the one thrown on Thiel start off again. But this isn't like "Just Cause", the guy won't say he isn't guilty, rather than that he's gonna commit more and more murders AND will rub on his lawyer face (that lousy privilege between client and defendant) his next moves. It's up to this man to find a way to stop this criminal. Pretty exciting, isn't it? "Criminal Law" becomes problematic when it decides to include random and uninteresting subplots about abortion, Thiel's family, and the lawyer's love interest and then it connects all of this parts together and mess it up real bad. It pretends to be real clever but it never succeeds. Take all that out and trade to saying something about ethics, difference between law and justice (they tried something about that but it wasn't enough), make a substantial dramatic film rather than 'to catch a serial killer' kind of thing and then we would have at least a decent movie, a relevant one. By all means, this is a poorly executed film that only wasted good actors in giving them bad scenes to perform with. Being the script the worst thing of it, we must be ashamed to testify Kevin Bacon giving one of his worst performances of all, completely on the automatic pilot and ridiculous playing the villain; Oldman has good moments when he's not trying to sustain so many different accents into an American role. And why on Earth do the script have to include an strange sex scene with him awkwardly interspersed with him playing squash? Ridiculous!. Hope that the money received by them was worth it because they could've done better than this. If you enjoy both actors I'll highly recommend "JFK" and "Murder in the First" (coincidentally in all of three films their characters never get along). "Criminal Law" I can't and won't suggest. A good idea and a wasted one. Big time! This is what happens when the hands get faster than the brain and the writer is not thinking of what's he doing. 5/10

In this film Gary Oldman plays a defense attorney, who was formerly a prosecutor. He is a bit tormented, but is more or less playing a regular guy rather than some sort of figurative or literal monster. Funny thing is, he doesn't quite pull it off. I guess you can't quite get to normal from there. Kevin Bacon was sufficiently creepy. The scene in the park was way too long with way too many false scares. And the odd sex scene with Oldman and Karen Young seemed to have come from a different movie, although the rest of the time Miss Young did just fine. This film suffers from oddness trying to cover up the predictability. And failing. Don't bother.

As usual, I'm in the minority. This film was very compelling! It bears intrigue, suspense, and a high level of atmosphere! Gary Oldman (who is VERY young here) is a defense attorney in a crisis. His client, it seems, should have been convicted for the crime for which Oldman has successfully defended him. That's not a spoiler, by the way, the discovery is made just inside the first act.The rest of the film involves Oldman's character going through all he can in order to get the facts against his client. In the real world, Oldman's character would face being disbarred if his actions were discovered, while the DA and ADA who were involved with that little operation, would face, at the least, disciplinary action.Now, that's not to say that no defense attorney has ever committed the actions Oldman's character commits, however, the consequences are quite clear. Attorney/client privilege is sacred. Violations of that contractual agreement are severe, and should be; therefore, the suspension of belief required herein is a bit high, but since no one who will assist in prosecuting the defense attorney understands to what extent Oldman's character betrays his client, it isn't so great as to break that spell.All in all, I found the performances herein highly entertaining, and the atmospheric drama quite enjoyable. This is one I will watch again.It rates an 8.8/10 from...the Fiend :.

There are indications that the script has some interesting things to say about vigilante justice and law enforcement (among other subjects), but they're lost in a film that's much too long, too slow and too dark (when it's night, you can barely make out what's happening). The characters are very sketchy, and the plot has almost no surprises. Perhaps the film would've worked better if Oldman (who's over-the-top as the lawyer) and Bacon had switched roles. (**)