Sidney Lumet, an old-fashioned New York liberal Jewish humanist in a Depraved New World of heedless materialism, might try to tell himself (with teeth gritted tighter than those of his leading lady, Rebecca De Mornay, and voce more sotto than that of his leading man, Don Johnson) that the story of a blossoming female criminal lawyer afflicted with a "monster client" -- a lady-killer who literally kills ladies, and who worms his way into his attorney's private life, who by court decree cannot be gotten rid of, and who ingratiates himself with every peripheral female from the office secretaries to the stern-faced judge in his murder trial -- is a worst-case parable of the Woman-in-the-Workplace. And if the confident, independent, aggressive, adept, successful lawyer can be done up to look like Hillary Clinton (Nineties-style feminist icon), so much the better. And somewhere off on the sidelines will be old Jack Warden, hoary specter from Lumet's first movie, Twelve Angry Men, in the role of a walking anachronism who disdains xerox machines, fax machines, word processors, the works: someone for the director and his contemporaries to identify with. It is not, however, as a social commentary that this movie will ultimately recommend itself, but as an unapologetic penny dreadful with more than a penny's worth of dreadfulness. The natural order of priority here is cleverness above credibility, and a diabolical allotment of the one, coupled with a bare minimum of the other, is all you can ask for. Written by Larry Cohen. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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