Forty-nine years after Sidney Lumet's first courthouse drama, as well as first film of any type, Twelve Angry Men (which, inasmuch as it takes place in the jury room, can't quite be called a courtroom drama), the now eighty-one-year-old director returns to the genre. He had gone back to it several times before: The Verdict, Guilty as Sin, Night Falls on Manhattan. This time he tells the factual story of the longest criminal trial in U.S. history: twenty-two months from 1986 through 1987, twenty separate defendants rounded up from the Lucchese crime family, seventy-six charges altogether, and at the end of the proceedings a brief fourteen hours of jury deliberations. The unwieldiness of it all, to say nothing of the talkiness of it all ("Most of the court dialogue is actual testimony"), mires Lumet in a passive, flat-footed visual style. What's worse, he seems a bit bewitched, a bit bowled over, a bit swept off his flat feet, by the "colorfulness" of the Mafia in general (a single tirade by the tightly wound prosecutor, preaching to the choir of his associates, can't stem the tide), and in particular the colorfulness of the convicted cocaine dealer, Jackie DiNorscio, who opts to serve as his own attorney, and who stoutly maintains his loyalty to the family even as its other members distance themselves from his courtroom antics: "I'm not a gangster, I'm just a gagster." Vin Diesel, "stretching" himself by putting on hair, pounds, and ill-fitting suits, at least cannot be accused of elevating the character through thespian classiness. Ron Silver, playing the long-suffering judge on the case, makes a first-rate straight man. With Peter Dinklage, Linus Roache, Alex Rocco, Annabella Sciorra. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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