A disbarred lawyer takes credit for a late friend's book, which becomes a smash hit but the tables turn on him sooner than he suspected. After a lawyer gets disbarred, he goes off to write a book about his experience. He meets a man who lets him read his manuscript. The man dies and the lawyer passes the book off as his. Just when the book becomes a big success. He gets arrested for the true life murders of the five lawyers in his book. He then finds himself, trying to prove that he is innocent of the murders. This was an entertaining, slight film, to watch on TV on a Friday night. The film is interesting, with good performances from Cuba Gooding Jr as a lawyer-turned-novelist and Mark Pellegrino as the man who has framed / is framing him. Don't expect to have all loose ends tied up - a potentially good and interesting angle, a link between Mark Pellegrino and Eric Scholtz (Thurman Parks III, the guilty scumbag, whom the Cuba Gooding character fails to defend) is hinted at but never explored. This film is a bit like an extended Misomer Murders episode or an early-ish Agatha Christie film- don't expect any realistic crafting of crime. Expect only to be entertained, and you might be surprised! The story is of an ex-lawyer becoming prime suspect in a multiple murder described in a book that he claims he wrote (but did not really). All is being told in a slow pace, and the director and actors seem to have become that bored during the making of the film, that their discomfort is passed to the unlucky viewer as well. With the story uncredible, with monotonous off-screen comments trying to fill in what we cannot get from the screen action, with conventional and non-inspired acting and filming, there is little left to like in this film (maybe the New Orleans and Key West landscape). One might share the antipathy for lawyers, but bad films do not get more sympathy either. 5/10 - avoid it!
Nemclari replied
344 weeks ago