Flick #13 of CINEMONSTER's MannVanuary Trois.

My List of Films that I'll be watching (or have watched) plus links to those Reviews can be found here:
Slappy McGee's 3rd MannVanuary - 2024.

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What a waste of a film's subject matter.
God, this movie was awful.

Could have been an interesting movie about an intriguing court case from the 90's... but it was completely ruined by an absolutely horrendous script.

It's like it was written by a 3-YEAR-OLD.

But it wasn't. It was co-written by director Margaret Betts and Doug Wright, who have combined to give us one of the world's worst courtroom dramas ever.

I'm serious. SNL's "Caveman Lawyer" had more realistic court scenes than this, and more believable dialogue than this rotted fish of a script.

It's sad because lead actors Tommy Lee Jones and Jamie Foxx are fantastic actors, but they still can't help this dreadful screenplay. There are times where both of these actors seem like they are doing really bad community theatre as they try to act their way around these horribly written lines.

Why did they even sign off on this script? They should both fire their agents immediately for allowing them to do this fiasco of a movie.

God, it's awful.

Besides the ridiculously bad dialogue, the fact that both writers BETTS and WRIGHT got most of the facts wrong about Hinds County in Mississippi is indicative of how LITTLE RESEARCH they did about the fucking TRUE STORY they were writing about!

Example: they say that "Hinds County" is a small, poor county in the southern part of the state. It is IN FACT the BIGGEST COUNTY in the central part of the state, containing the State Capital Jackson the biggest CITY in the state, and it's the RICHEST county in the state.

The fuck?

Idiots.
I hate idiot writers, or maybe just lazy, but either way... they suck.

Then the director Betts - who will hopefully never be allowed to direct another movie after this piece of shit - doesn't even have the smarts to correct certain cast members on the correct way to say "Biloxi" - (this always drives me nuts when actors do this. It's "Bu-LUCK-see" not "Bee-LOCKS-see"). God, such an easy thing to catch and fix if an actor comes in and mispronounces shit like that.

But obviously, this director is clueless or doesn't care or is truly that inept. And the same goes for every other person on set that didn't help to fix these kinds of mistakes that plague this movie.

Hell, this is not even the main reason this movie sucks, it just adds to the bullshit that is the weakest dialogue I've ever heard in a courtroom drama.

The only reason I'm not giving this movie a 1/2 star only, is because the main actors are good and a couple of supporting actors shine as well (shine through the horseshit of this script).

Jurnee Smollett is fairly solid although she is a bit melodramatic and plays a stereotype of a character - but that's mainly the script's fault. She's just performing the character that's written. Heck, her biggest flaw is just being related to that joke-of-a-hoaxster brother of hers. Yikes! That's a tough speed bump to get over in life. Feel bad for her really. But she has talent and should be used in better material for sure.

Bill Camp is also a great character actor that has gotten a TON of work over the past several years. He's a good villain in this one - a Canadian Villain at that - tough to pull off really, unless your name is Justin Trudeau I guess. Ha! But Camp is doing his best, but like Foxx and Jones, he's just mired in a rush of poorly written lines.

I usually love me some Alan Ruck, but he's woefully miscast in the role of a bigoted, Mississippi-bred lawyer - a "good ol' boy"... because Ruck is definitely not that. And I guess his acting limitations are evident in this movie as he - in no way - was able to pull off that leap of believability. Several very important scenes fall flat because they are dependent on Ruck being that stereotypical character that he just isn't convincing as.

Ah wells...

So, yeah... this movie is a fucking trainwreck. And I have little-to-zero patience for a film that has a big starred cast, with money in their pockets and that fails miserably at almost every turn.

Pathetic.

(...wow... I got really worked up writing that... I need a mint julip and a nap on the veranda...)