The Judge (15A) ***
WHAT A GLORIOUS MESS The Judge is. A potentially terrific family and courtroom drama trapped inside the package of a bloated, overlong melodrama, this is a movie packed with both potential and cliché.
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Still, the more powerful moments resonate well and the movie’s worth your ticket price for the super scenes between Robert Downey Jr and Robert Duvall.
Their father-son relationship is one full of complexities you don’t normally see in a mainstream movie.
RDJ is Hank Palmer - a rich, egotistical big city lawyer whose apparently perfect life starts to fall away when he discovers his stunning wife has been cheating on him.
This his mother dies, meaning he must travel home to small town Indiana and spend time with his brothers and his estranged father, the town judge (Duvall).
Hank cannot wait to get back to his life and his city pad, despite a flirtation with an old girlfriend (Vera Farmiga).
But when blood on his father’s car implicates him in the death of a criminal whose case he once handled, they’re forced to try and park their differences in an effort to prevent him going to jail.
As the synopsis suggests, The Judge desperately wants to be many different movies - a courtroom thriller, a family drama, a romance - and nearly falls apart in trying to be all of them.
In the final hour in particular, there are some incidents that are downright silly. Yet some of the storytelling is undeniably powerful and Downey is excellent in the kind of role we rarely see him take on these days. The scenes between him and Duvall are outstanding - it’s a shame about all the superfluous melodramas you have to sit through to enjoy them.
The Best of Me (12) **
Michelle Monaghan and James Marsden head the cast of The Best of Me (12A), the latest of a flurry of Hollywood adaptations of Nicholas Sparks’s novels.
The romantic drama sees Monaghan and Marsden play Amanda and Dawson, two former high-school sweethearts who meet for the first time in two decades when they return home for a friend’s funeral.
The spark of romance that drew them together in the first place quickly becomes apparent again.
But it’s not long before the differences and forces that drove them apart force them to decide whether their romance is for keeps second time around.
Monaghan and Marsden are such talented actors that very occasionally they make you forget how horrifically bad the writing is here.
Their romance plays out through a series of interminable clichés and Hollywood’s formulaic idea of what romantic scenarios will play well with target audiences.
The last half hour in particular, is a shambles, packed with ridiculously melodramatic plot twists that are laughably ridiculous.
This is a manipulative tearjerker that had me weeping alright - just not in the manner the filmmakers intended.
