Courtroom drama, with all the freeze-dried flavor of a TV series pilot. A burnt-out radical lawyer of the late-Sixties and early-Seventies, who has since traded in his William Kunstler-ian clientele for a parade of mid-level drug peddlers, gets his liberal fires re-lit by an eight-year-old case of an apparent gang slaying in Chinatown. This spiritual rebirth occurs under the worshipful gaze of, but without any special impetus from, his young and idealistic (i.e., non-yuppie) junior partner. The two of them are ably assisted by, and sometimes just cheered on and up by, a dewy female private detective. (They are played, respectively, by James Woods, Robert Downey, Jr., and Margaret Colin, though in the hypothetical TV series we may have to settle for Pernell Roberts, David Hasselhoff, and Shelley Hack.) Nothing here makes a lot of sense; almost everything makes very little sense. It is hard to see, for example, what it means for the lawyer to have "sold out" when all he has received for the sale is a low-rent walk-up in Greenwich Village and he hasn't had to part with either his ponytail or his stash of pot. And the case itself is so full of holes (what successfully prosecuted murder case has ever been reopened solely on the testimony of a resident in the loony bin?) that its dramatic climaxes can never swell to their intended grandeur, but can only lie there in a rumpled heap, spluttering hot air. Directed by Joseph Ruben. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd
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