Criminal Law (1989)

I picked this movie because I was in the mood for a crime thriller, and I love Gary Oldman and Kevin Bacon. I thought it was weird that I had never heard of this movie, but now I can see why.Kevin Bacon actually delivers in his usual role as a creepy rapist, and Gary Oldman is not bad considering what he had to work with. I did have to snort at some of his overwrought intensity, but it did not really seem like that was his fault as much as the filmmakers.I felt annoyed with the movie as soon as the Nietzsche quote appeared in the beginning, it struck me as pretty cliché. Then Oldman did his whole "clear" thing with the glass of water and I was like... OK that was a pointless prop, he's showing the jury that water is clear just like the facts? That's pretty dumb. But as dumb as the movie was presenting itself to be, it was truly I who was dumb, thinking that with Oldman and Bacon this was still going to be a good movie.The dumbest thing about the movie is that the majority of scenes are completely pointless or make no sense. First of all, the entire premise is stupid. Why did rich attorney Oldman go wandering around in the woods in the rain looking for Bacon in the first place, just because he called him? Why did he run to find someone instead of just using the phone in his car? Why did he go to the extent of becoming his lawyer just to get a special "in" on him? The majority of the film is Oldman brooding and snooping around on his own, little time is actually focused on the relationship which is supposed to be the whole point of his scheme. Why wouldn't the police have figured out right away that all the victims had been treated by the prime suspect's mother, something that would have shown up in medical records? Even many small scenes had me going, wait, what? For example, Oldman goes to Bacon's house, presumably to meet him... snoops around the room until he gets caught by the mom and then he just leaves... so why was he there in the first place?? Why does he meet up with the cop lady in a playground with milk and cookies? Why does he imagine that he is having sex with Bacon's character, honestly?? And why does the mom try to protect the son who is raping and murdering her patients??? And what was the point of even having the old man character? And why does Oldman visit him randomly in the hospital??? That was so random... like, here's this old man you saw for two seconds in the beginning for no reason, and oh yeah he's in the hospital for a few more seconds, because why not.. And I had kind of zoned out by the end, but how did Bacon even get into the courtroom alone with Oldman with a gun just by firing a few shots??I will say there was some interesting camera work and cool set design.But the most unbearable thing is the amount of dialogue. The few minutes of Bacon being menacing are actually scary, but the majority of the movie is just people talking. Talking, talking, talking with no plot development. But whatever, it's not like film is a visual medium or anything.I like how the film ended pointlessly with Oldman just walking out of the room... because I did not have the energy to sit through an attempt at an actual ending anyway. It was actually better with no ending because at least it was over sooner!!!

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

A woman police officer, Tess Harper, shoots a running man square through the head at a distance of fifty feet with a short-barreled revolver. Now, if you can believe that, you will get more out of this movie than I did.It's not an especially BAD movie, in the sense that at least it's not insulting. And in fact the story had real potential. Gary Oldman of the droopy face is a high-end Boston attorney hired by filthy rich Kevin Bacon, who has been accused of serial murders involving diapers stuffed in the victims' mouths. (Don't ask.) Oldman is a Harvard graduate and therefore brilliant. He saves Bacon's bacon, to general rejoicing.Without too much further ado, he finds that Bacon was guilty after all when the murders begin all over again and Bacon practically confesses. The problem is that there is no way to convict Bacon, and Oldman, out of an excess of chagrin, takes it upon himself to investigate the new cases and try to find inculpatory evidence.The acting is pretty good on everyone's part. The dialog has some startlingly effective lines. The performers look and speak as one would expect such characters to -- except that the murderer, Kevin Bacon, stares ghoulishly at every dramatic moment. If he blinked his eyes AT ALL during the movie, I must have been blinking myself.I don't know if that unblinking, murderous stare was Bacon's idea. I hope not. I suspect it was at the least encouraged by the director, Martin Campbell, because the fiend who is unable to nictitate is a cliché -- and the movie is full of clichés.That life-saving miraculous shot by Tess Harper is only the climactic example. One of the most overused stings has an innocent person creeping about in a dark room, searching for something he or, more often she, shouldn't be looking for. All is quiet. We tremble along with the intruder. Then a clash of dissonance in the score, and a hand reaches in from out of the frame and grabs the person's shoulder, or she bumps into a figure standing in the shadows, or she hears a noise and whirls her flashlight around to reveal the face of a threatening intruder, or a pair of arms wrap around her neck from behind. I counted at least four uses of this hoary device before I stopped looking for them.I'll mention just one other. A terrified man stumbles through a public park during a downpour, trips over some brush, rolls helplessly down the side of a hill, and comes to rest on a mutilated human body.Enough.It's too bad, because there are signs of intelligence glimmering through this hackneyed murk. Your Honor -- ladies and gentleman of the jury -- I direct your attention to the anecdote told by the dying librarian in the hospital, the little parable about Justice Brandeis and the shadow of the law. Corroborating evidence, which I now introduce as Exhibit Number Two, is provided by Kevin Bacon's fable, the one in the punt, of the man caught whipping God's dog. Nobody brings up Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism versus Kant's categorical imperatives, although they might have, but thank God they didn't.A shame it was all thrown away in the service of titillating the audience through the use of commercial tricks.

The blame of this terrible flick lies with the director, Martin Campbell. After viewing a few of his credits in later years, this must have been one of his first directorial gigs. He had a more than decent cast to work with but unfortunately he had no idea what he was doing. There were scenes that made absolutely no sense at all. Where was his head...............was he on drugs? I was looking forward to this movie just because of Oldman & Bacon. Maybe it was a short shooting schedule and Campbell just had to "bang it out". I can't imagine that the story that Campbell directed even came close to the story that the writer wrote. Oldman & Bacon, along with the rest of the cast, must have slid under their chairs if they went to the screening. As one poster pointed out, Karen Young did do a pretty good fight scene with Bacon. She really did 'let loose'. It's unfortunate that I have to fill in more space just to stay within the guide lines of what the IMDb requires because I really don't have anything more to say about this uninspiring film. One does not have to be forced to be a 'windbag' when criticizing a terrible flick and wish that the IMDb would change the amount of words to fill up a critique.