by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: Joseph Ruben
CAST: James Woods, Robert Downey Jr., Margaret Colin, Yuji Okumoto, Kurtwood Smith
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Fresh
PLOT: A cynical former civil liberties attorney, now reduced to “specializing” in defending drug dealers, becomes transformed by an eight-year-old murder case.
I don’t know if True Believer counts as a “forgotten” film in today’s world, but it’s certainly not a movie that I hear mentioned anymore. Directed by genre-hopping journeyman Joseph Ruben, whose films are more recognizable than he is (Dreamscape, The Stepfather, Sleeping with the Enemy), and anchored by James Woods and Robert Downey Jr., True Believer is a solid entry in the crime/courtroom drama/thriller arena, at least in broad strokes. However, there are momentary lapses of logic that strain credulity, and despite the momentum of everything around them, they were enough to affect my opinion/impression of the movie.
After a flashback and prologue that introduces us to his future client, we meet Eddie Dodd (James Woods), a fiery former civil liberties attorney who once defended Black Panthers and other social revolutionaries in the 1960s. Now, at the tail end of the ‘80s, in the waning days of the “Me Generation”, he specializes in defending drug dealers and/or distributors under the guise of painting the government’s use of wiretaps and undercover agents as invasions of privacy…a shabby attempt at investing his sleazy client list with some sort of social nobility. Into his life comes an aspiring attorney, Roger Baron (future Oscar-winner Robert Downey Jr., looking fresh and innocent during what must have been one of his infamous rough patches). Roger idolizes the old Eddie Dodd, the idealist, and is severely disillusioned by the current Eddie, the opportunist.
Things change, though, when a Korean mother and daughter track Eddie down and ask him to defend their son and brother, Shu Kai Kim (Yuji Okumoto, The Karate Kid Part II, Better Off Dead), who is eight years into a prison term for a murder they say he didn’t commit. The daughter says she tracked him down by going to all the courthouses: “They all speak of you, and they all say the same thing…you do cases cheap.” He dismisses them with a vague promise to “review the material,” but after some predictable prodding from Roger, his new conscience incarnate, he takes the case.
What follows is a well-directed, well-paced mystery-slash-courtroom thriller. It’s not fancy or especially slick, but it held my interest, which is all I ask of a mystery where I’m expected to keep track of a lot of information. And there is a lot of information to keep track of. Eddie and Roger, with the assistance of their P.I., Kitty (the invaluable Margaret Colin), uncover inconsistencies in witness accounts, inconsistencies from their own client, the involvement of the Aryan Army, a bona fide conspiracy theorist who believes the phone company killed Kennedy, and a possible link to an 8-year-old drug bust. (That’s about all I can say about the plot without ruining the surprises of the evidence chain.)
As I said before, the movie is solid, but they made one major misstep: casting the talented Kurtwood Smith as opposing counsel, D.A. Robert Reynard. From his first scene, no matter how nicely he smiles or how friendly he seems, he is obviously the bad guy, because it’s Kurtwood Smith. Because of his mere presence, you know he’s not to be trusted and must be brought low, no matter how logical his courtroom arguments are. He is clearly the villain, even if he’s not doing anything truly wrong. So right away, any possible objectivity about who’s right and who’s wrong is skewed. It would have been more interesting if the ostensible bad guy had been cast by someone who is at least a little ambiguous. Just my two cents.
There are other issues. As the investigation progresses, there is an anguished speech from Eddie to Shu Kai Kim that spells out exactly where the title of the movie comes from and ends with some tortured dialogue that must have looked good on the page, but just doesn’t feel right coming out of James Woods’s mouth. In another scene, Eddie walks away from two armed men who have every reason to shoot him in the back but inexplicably choose not to, presumably due to a sudden attack of conscience. Given what these two men had done just previously, this inaction seemed wildly improbable. Then the D.A., whom we have seen is highly intelligent, allows himself to get cornered in the courtroom when he absolutely should not have. Not the actions of a smart man…but certainly the actions of the clear villain, because it’s Kurtwood Smith.
Because of these inconsistencies, True Believer will probably never be mentioned in the same breath with Jagged Edge or The Verdict or any other great courtroom thriller. But the performances from the leads are more than adequate (despite James Woods’s incongruous ponytail), and the mystery is fun to unravel, and Joseph Ruben’s direction is competent if not splashy. In other words, it’s your slightly above-average ‘80s genre movie. (And I am sometimes a sucker for ‘80s nostalgia, so…there you go.)
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 