True Believer [DVD]

This is James Woods at his best. Never known to play against type, here Woods puts in a blistering performance as a cynical, burnt-out criminal defence lawyer, once a darling of the civil liberties camp, but now an amoral hack defending drug-dealing scumbags and other skells that no-one else will touch.
For reasons that are never made totally clear - something to do with the arrival from the DA's office of newly-qualified lawyer Robert Downey Jr, who is attached to him as a sort of apprentice - he elects to dig up an old case and try to overturn the watertight conviction of a Korean youth, convicted of murdering a drug dealer in plain view of about six thousand witnesses. The pair of them burrow and ferret away, re-interviewing old witnesses and case officers and gumshoeing around until (surprise surprise) they find that the Korean was set up as the fall-guy for an FBI witness-protection programme.
I won't give any more of the plot away here. It doesn't sound any different, the way I've described it, to dozens of other wrongful-conviction-overturned-by-lone-hero stories, and in most ways it isn't. But what sets it apart is Woods' performance. The man has screen-presence in bucketloads and by half-way through has you sitting on the edge of your seat, willing him to succeed. At the end I felt I'd seen a top-notch thriller, and really that's all that matters where films like this are concerned. Next to him, Downey (who everyone seems to swoon over as the greatest screen actor since Hurd Hatfield) is as a feather on the breath of God. But then, when Woods is on form, so is everyone else (except Brian Dennehy - see "Best Seller").
Stay in and watch it.

James Woods he is a nut case
I like him cause of that

in a dramatic movie
he is funny
and add good humor
It is a must see movie, if you like James Woods

One more film about the corruption that is killing the NYPD and the District Attorney in that area. Then it is all a question of details. Gritty details. When you are working on a big business like the Colombian connection, you need informers and of course these have a price and that price is simple, total and absolute protection and impunity in their everyday criminal life. In this very particular case there seemed to be some kind of family business that made the informer nervous and he had to kill some kind of boyfriend of his daughter or something and then cover up his crime by having the police arrest and have an other man accused, as long as he was not a Caucasian nor someone from his own band or gang and that's how a Korean was dragged into prison and stayed there eight years. But the film is nothing so far. The point is how the defense attorney is going to get the truth out and his client out of the can. He has to force a couple of people into saying what has to be said and then he can trap the district attorney into revealing that the Korean was just the price to pay for the information about the Colombian connection. A pay off. Then the film is finished and we can go home and rest on our beds with no fear. The most rotten police force and prosecuting branch of justice are watching over us and assessing who they are going to drag down into their nets to pay off some criminal for the little information he has provided them with about some cosmic scandal or surrealistic plot. That's when we regret not to be able to hitchhike our way out of this galaxy to go under another sun on another planet to sun our bones in peace and security. But that is certainly not in our beautiful cities. Enjoy the film, the stunts are great though the stuntmen are a little bit passive.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines